Some people might remember SuperSonic Imagine as one of the sponsors of GUADEC this year. If this is your case, I guess your reaction was but who are those people?, and what is their relationship with GNOME? Which is understandable, since they're working in the medical imaging field: that's not really where you expect GNOME to be, do you? If you read a bit about the company, you can easily find out that they are building a platform to measure and visualize tissue elasticity (I'm quoting from the website) and one of the application is breast cancer diagnosis.

It turns out SuperSonic Imagine has been building a product around this: it's a system called Aixplorer. Mmmh, I could try to give details about their product, but I would probably be caught just repeating what I can see on their website ;-) It contains some information about the product and the medical technologies it's based on, and there's also a brochure with some details. Anyway, back to the topic: there's quite some free software inside this system, including the usual suspects from the GNOME platform. It also looks like they're big fans of cairo, and they're using a compositing manager based on cairo. They're working on putting the relevant source code and patches up somewhere, but I guess most (all?) of the interesting stuff is already available, for people who don't want to wait.

It's quite exciting to see free software used in such a field, and to think that it contributes to have an impact on the life of people we never thought of. Oh, and I heard that users can see the GNOME logo when the system boots. Extremely cool :-)