No matter how great a surgeon's skill, no surgery can have the desired outcome if the tissue is insufficiently perfused.

For more than forty years, Transonic has built technology that answers the question objectively and quantifiably. Here are four facts about the name behind the technology that you might not know.

1. Transonic was founded because velocity measurement was never enough

In the 1970s, the tools available to measure blood flow had fundamental limitations. Doppler flow measurement tools had been around for a couple of decades prior but, to this day, Doppler only measures velocity, not volume.

Cornelis (Cor) Drost, who was working at Cornell University as an engineer and scientist at the time, was tasked with designing a better method.

What he developed became the world's first transit-time ultrasound flowmeter for biomedical applications. He founded Transonic in 1983 to bring it to clinical practice. The first FDA-cleared clinical flowmeter followed in 1988.

The problem Drost worked to solve nearly half a century ago is the same one that surgical teams encounter today: Doppler only gives half the picture and something is needed to provide the whole picture.

2. When clinicians need something that doesn't exist, Transonic builds it

The Transonic product lines (spanning cardiothoracic, cerebrovascular, transplant, microvascular, vascular, hemodialysis, and mechanical circulatory support) exist because surgeons kept encountering problems that available technology couldn't solve.

When Boston Children's Hospital identified a need for smaller flowprobe sizes to support pediatric care, Transonic built them. When cerebrovascular surgeon Dr. Fady Charbel needed precision tools capable of measuring flow during complex intracranial procedures, Transonic co-developed the Charbel Micro-Flowprobe series alongside him.

The product line reflects forty years of listening to what surgeons actually need.

3. Four decades of published clinical evidence

Transonic's technology has been cited in thousands of published studies across human surgery, bench validation, and life-critical device testing.

Most recently, a landmark Mayo Clinic study following 177 infrageniculate bypasses over 20 years reached the direct conclusion that intraoperative flow measurement matters. That body of evidence spans specialties and settings, and it continues to accumulate.

4. The relationship doesn’t end when the procedure does

Transonic builds devices used in some of the most consequential moments in medicine. That context shapes everything from how precisely the tools are engineered to how specifically they are built for each clinical application. Forty years of innovation in flow measurement is, at its core, forty years of caring about what happens to patients.

See why leading surgical teams choose Transonic and transit-time flow measurement.