Category: news

Our Founder Paul Reed Smith and CEO Scott Haiges wrapped up their live, on-air interview with Bloomberg Markets. We hope you’ll listen to and share the interview here!

For more information about Digital Harmonic, please visit our Contact Us page.

Our Founder Paul Reed Smith and CEO Scott Haiges were honored as they went live on Bloomberg Radio—“the world’s only global 24-hour business radio station”—to discuss Digital Harmonic, on Thursday, August 17 at 4:45 PM Eastern Standard Time.

For more information, please visit our contact us page.

We were very pleased to announce that our Founder Paul Reed Smith was the keynote speaker at MIT’s Cybersecurity, Exploitation and Operations Workshop, which took place on June 6th and 7th! For more information, please contact us.

As reported by the ChesaDel Crier, our Founder Paul Reed Smith will be “…the speaker for the J.C. Jones Seminar in American Business…” and will “…receive an honorary degree, Doctor of Public Service,” from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland on April 17th!

Legendary guitar maker Paul Reed Smith (founder of PRS Guitars), a team of renowned scientists and physicians, and a former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration are launching a new technology to develop enhanced, sharper X-rays while significantly reducing the amount of radiation exposed to patients and medical providers.

The new company, Digital Harmonic™ LLC, has developed a proprietary and patented image and waveform
technology that aims to revolutionize how the medical community implements x-rays. The company has already raised $5 million and is seeking to raise another $5 million to fund its growth.

The technology is the result of a decade of research that started with Paul Reed Smith’s late father Jack Smith, an applied mathematician. Combining his understanding of precision mathematics and physics together with
his son Paul’s understanding of sound and harmonics from guitar making created this revolutionary technology.

“We figured out how to extract previously undetected data out of complex sound waveforms and then applied that new theory to create remarkably detailed images,” said Smith. “The potential for the medical community
to be able to get much more precise images is exciting.”

Smith continues: “As a mathematical and physics solution, this image and waveform technology could truly
revolutionize the practice of medical imaging by providing physicians with images that provide much greater detail. Most existing medical solutions are either chemical, radiation or mechanical. This new approach
proposes a mathematical and physics solution for medicine.”

Digital Harmonic has assembled an advisory board of nationally prominent scientists and medical experts who will help guide the development of its products, including:

• Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, President, Samaritan Health Initiatives Inc., former head of the Food and Drug
  Administration, former Director, National Cancer Institute;
• William G. Nelson, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins Medical Center;
• Theodore DeWeese, M.D. Professor and Chairman of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences,
  Johns Hopkins;
• John Wong, Ph.D., Professor of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences, Johns Hopkins;
• Alex Szalay, Ph.D, Professor of Astrophysics and Computer Sciences, Johns Hopkins;
• Srinivasan Yegnasubramanian, Associate Professor of Oncology, Johns Hopkins;
• Elliott McVeigh, Ph.D Professor, Bioengineering, University of California San Diego;
• Paul Reed Smith, General Managing Partner-PRS Guitars and a principal inventor of the Company’s proprietary
  technology; and,
• Michael C. Hibler, MPA, Director of Development, Johns Hopkins.

In addition to developing the technology for increasing image resolution for x-rays, the company expects
to utilize its patented image, sound and analytic abilities to manufacture products to aid other diagnostic
technologies in addition to x-rays.

Smith said the company’s proprietary technology could also have wide applications in the defense community, which relies on access to precise image analysis. The company is currently in contract negotiations with a
major defense contractor for the U.S. Navy.

Digital Harmonic™ LLC commenced operations upon achieving its minimum funding requirement of $5 million. The company will continue to accept subscriptions for additional units until it reaches its maximum initial
funding of $10 million. According to a Private Placement Memorandum, each unit is $500,000, which may be fractionalized at the company’s discretion.

Today, we’re pleased to introduce our new CEO, Scott Haiges! Scott comes to us from the venture capital world and has over twenty years of experience building and selling technology companies. He will be responsible for operations and business development.

Scott was enamored with our technology from the first time he saw it, and after spending a few months assisting with fundraising, Founder Paul Reed Smith offered Scott the position.

For more information on Scott and our other team members, visit our Team page.

Classical scholars may only describe the connection between geometry and music through the quadrivium—four of the seven arts associated with a liberal arts education—but Paul Reed Smith lives within that nexus. Smith is a respected master luthier and the founder and owner of PRS Guitars. His state-of-the-art factory produces finely crafted, high-end instruments that are played and endorsed by such prominent musicians as Carlos Santana and Howard Leese. Last year, news broke that Smith had created something different—a technological advancement in image resolution that could be groundbreaking in medicine and other fields.

Smith is a born craftsman. He enrolled in multiple shop classes while attending Bowie High School so he could get his hands on the machines. “It was the only way I could learn how to use a lathe, or a milling machine, or a band saw,” he says, “It was all very important stuff.” He was curious and interested, and his first experiences creating objects from wood felt very natural to him. “It did not feel like something that was difficult,” he recalls. “It was like going on the beginning of a journey. It was joyful.”

Smith wanted to play music but didn’t have the money to buy a guitar, so he applied his woodworking skills. “I didn’t see it as art at the time. But everybody else was making cutting boards, and I was making bass guitars in shop.” He did the same with gear, measuring a speaker cabinet, buying 15-inch speakers at Radio Shack, and building his own version of an Electro-Voice Eliminator speaker.

A transition occurred when he set up his workshop in a garret at 33 West Street in Annapolis. He no longer saw himself only as a guitar maker and repairman, and he began to feel the artistry of his work. His design process is both intuitive and cerebral. “My parents were both mathematicians, and I didn’t understand that I carried the gene,” he explains. Smith hated arithmetic and algebra with a passion, but applied three-dimensional mathematics, such as geometry and trigonometry, came naturally. “I could rotate a [guitar] neck in my head easily to see all the different parts. I could see the speaker cabinet from all angles in my head. It was easy. Once I measured it, I could make it. It’s very much graphic math.”

The mathematics of sound waves led Smith to his latest discovery. While trying to create a guitar synthesizer, he spoke with his father, who had studied with the theoretical physicist George Gamow at George Washington University. He asked how to possibly accelerate the time it took to know the frequency of a tone, and his father responded, “Just measure the high harmonics; you’ll know before the first [oscillation] goes by.” That sounded implausible to Smith, but reasonable to his father. A physics lesson ensued.

His father explained that graphic displays of sound signals over frequency and time are typically displayed as a waterfall pattern on a surface. He posited that the surface is not real, and hence sound measurements could be derived without it. The next day, they were in the patent office. “We had so many ideas about the way we could change things. It took us ten years of talking about it to figure out what we’d even run across.”

Smith’s “aha” moment came one night, seven years ago, during a hurricane. “I was all by myself in the house, no kids, no wife, no power, and the trees were going nuts in the backyard. And I’m lying there with nothing to do. And I realized that everything my father taught me applied to images.” Then he went to work.

The result: a set of algorithms that can be applied to developed images to enhance them, so that X-rays, CAT scans, and PET scans look clearer. “You could turn the X-rays down by four-fifths and still be able to get a good image, even though there would be way less radiation hitting the plate,” he says. Using gaming computers—which, according to Smith, work twenty thousand times faster than a supercomputer—the images can be enhanced in one one-thousandth of a second.

Partnering with an advisory board of scientists and physicians, Smith introduced his imaging company, Digital Harmonic LLC, in November 2015. It’s a high-powered team that includes serious software developers and an applied mathematician. The recent hire of a chief executive officer—an accomplished businesswoman—allows Smith to fully dedicate his time to PRS. Digital Harmonic plans to have field-ready equipment available in spring 2016.

While his waveform imaging efforts are about to become realized, Smith’s creative juices continue to flow and focus around guitar development and innovation. “We’re getting ready to release something in the next couple months that I have been up to my eyeballs in!” he says.

All his life, 60-year-old Paul Reed Smith has loved guitars.

But he hasn’t loved math. At least, he didn’t think he did.

It’s true that the founder of PRS Guitars, located just over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Stevensville, had parents who were mathematicians; his father was very involved in radar projects during World War II.

But the younger Smith never thought that gene was in him.

However, it is. All along, he’s been using algebraic equations while designing guitars; he didn’t realize it, however, until his late father pointed it out one day about 13 years ago when they were fishing.

It’s a long story, but that’s when Smith realized that the equations he was using at PRS could be used not only at his job, but across the medical, defense, and numerous other industries. And he recently founded Columbia-based Digital Harmonic to market software that is designed to, among many other uses, detect breast cancer in a more effective way.

It’s a big risk, but a risk that a number of investors believe will pay off, especially given Smith’s business acumen and the versatility of the new software.

If they’re right, he’ll be known not only as the man who built a guitar empire by making axes for A-list rock stars like Carlos Santana, Alex Lifeson of Rush, and Journey’s Neal Schon, but as someone who had a hand in saving lives. And potentially much more.

The Awakening

The story began when Smith “hooked a monster of a shark” while fishing with his father on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. That happenstance, for some reason, spurred a physics lesson from the old man.

They ended up in a discussion about algebra, and how the equations he used at work have other applications. Lots of them, too.

“We were in the [U.S.] Patent [and Trademark] Office the next week,” said Smith. “We spent a long time just figuring out what we’d come up with. It was a device that [gleaned] a huge amount of information out of a waveform [from data], like heartbeats. And it was the same thing with images, like a chest X-ray.

“We’d figured out a way to extract data, like your brain does,” he said, from “what you can see and hear,” though adding little more about the patents, which were awarded by the U.S. government on Dec. 31, 2013 for waveform and on Oct. 28, 2014 for imaging.

The first product is just coming to market, after what Smith only termed “significant investment” by PRS Guitars and by private investors, most of whom are from Maryland. Smith said he picked Columbia as the location for Digital Harmonic’s offices due to the pool of skilled high tech workers in the area, the easy access to BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport, and “because we have classy digs” on Route 108, near Snowden River Parkway.

Vast Applications

In opening the new office, Smith is “handing off” the technology and management duties to CTO Shane Morris and CEO Roshni Sherbondy, a veteran of several federal government agencies and three private companies, to develop systems for security applications. Sherbondy has been in touch with patent attorneys and has hired Digital Harmonic’s starting crew, which includes many consultants.

“Her employers have always been hardware-centric,” Smith said, “and maximizing what the data has to offer has always been an issue.”

“I felt very intrigued when I saw this software, because it allows sensor companies to use their data in a much more effective way,” said Sherbondy. “I felt like it would solve issues I’ve experienced,” which have included effectively screening bags at airports and the development of acoustic, radar, electro-optic, and millimeter waves and similar technologies.

Sherbondy said that Digital Harmonic’s technology is in the prototyping phase and “that we plan to create medical products and defense products, too (exactly how the processing works more effectively than existing capabilities is protected by the patents).”

She added, however, that “the results from our processing offer a more accurate representation of images and waveforms in time, frequency and amplitude, thus allowing for more clarity in images, [creating] more information that can result in the easier detection of cancers and heart issues, as well as military threats, etc.

“The breadth of applications for this technology is vast, and I feel it has unlimited potential,” Sherbondy said. “We are aiming to further develop our software and gain [approvals] while penetrating the medical and government markets.”

That versatility “proposes an interesting way of changing how we look at images,” said Michael Hibler, director of development at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. “If images are made of waveforms, that inherently means that there is noise within those waves.”

But the technology “is not a filter,” he said. “What Paul is proposing is a very clever way of enhancing and reconstructing images based on math algorithms and finding additional data through how the technology processes waveforms.”

And know, Hibler said, that “its potential uses go far beyond the medical field. The analysis tool doesn’t care what it’s measuring, and it provides a great opportunity to think bigger.

“Math is incredibly logical,” he said. “Using it as a tool is an interesting science.”

Do the Math

“There is much basic science in what is happening here,” Hibler said “We have to work hard to translate it into applications. The onus is on Digital Harmonic to do so.”

And, as Smith now better understands, there is a great deal of math involved in building a guitar, as there is in building a software program.

“One of the best things I’ve learned from Paul is that not only is the quality of an instrument crucial, but the same principle applies in science, where we look to make an experiment repeatable,” said Hibler. “You need to do that in manufacturing to assure that each guitar stays in tune and resonates.”

Speaking of resonation, Smith, who has lost a brother to cancer, said that “many departments at Hopkins have been very receptive to our technology” and that it’s time for this new show to open.

“We will start with CT scans and stent operations,” he said, noting that the first product should be fully operational within four months. “We still need FDA approval, and we have $5 million worth of shares left to be sold, but [the company’s outlook is] very promising.”

PRS Guitars is synonymous with rock music and arguably some of the best guitars around.

So some people wouldn’t expect to hear the name Paul Reed Smith in the science community…until now.

Smith started a Columbia-based company called Digital Harmonic with the hopes of providing life-saving data for patients with breast cancer.

Smith said this was not the path he originally intended to follow, and to call him a reluctant mathematician is an understatement.

“You taught me algebra, I’d get into a fist fight with you,” Smith said.

Yet early on, Smith seemed destined for a career in math.

“My father and mother were mathematicians, and I didn’t think I carried the gene,” Smith said.

But in a roundabout way, he did “have the gene”; it just took some time to discover.

Starting out, Smith knew he loved working with his hands and built his first guitar in college. He is now the owner of PRS Guitars, one of the most widely-known guitar brands around.

“For me, making a guitar, I was taking it apart like this and rotating it in my head,” Smith said. “I could see it from many directions in my mind. So for me, that was math and I didn’t know that.”

By comparing the way a synthesizer measures sound, Smith discovered this was a link between music and math that had the potential for use in science.

“I remember very clearly when my father and I ran across this solution. We didn’t even have words for it,” Smith said.

Smith took his discovery to his friend, Dr. Bill Nelson, director of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.

“It was all theoretical when I was showing it to Bill, but I was like, there’s a mathematical way to extract this data out of a file, and I explained it to him,” Smith said. “Once we coded it up it was a different ballgame.”

Smith’s discovery meant the measurement could be used to analyze waveforms, in images such as a mammogram, producing a much more precise image while also dramatically reducing the amount of radiation needed.

“This is very blurry, and this is crystal clear,” Smith said. “I’m telling you that crystal clear is in that digital data.”

Smith said his discovery is a potential game changer in the fight against breast cancer and other forms of cancer and, with it, a chance to renew hope in Smith’s life.

“At that time, I didn’t know I was going to lose my brother to cancer,” Smith said. “I didn’t know it was going to affect so many people that I love.”

The impact this technology could have is unknown.

“With any kind of thing, it’s high-risk but the reward could be extraordinary,” Smith said.

Smith’s technologies are patented and awaiting U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. Until then, he’s still making guitars while pouring his heart and soul into finding a cure for cancer.