OPTISCAN INVIVAGE

OptiScan, a Melbourne medical technology company, approached us to name its first clinically certified product. The device is a hand-held digital microscope. A probe with a 4mm tip is touched against living tissue, and within seconds the clinician sees it at the level of individual cells, in real time and at 1000x magnification. No sample is cut, no slide is prepared, and the patient doesn’t wait days for a lab result. Developed first for the mouth, it helps clinicians tell normal, precancerous and cancerous tissue apart, and helps surgeons see where a tumour ends so it can be removed in the first operation.

OptiScan already had a strong technical track record: it had developed the technology behind the market-leading device sold by Carl Zeiss Meditec. Even so, its own name was little known outside the industry, and inside it OptiScan was seen mainly as a maker of pre-clinical research probes.
We built the tagline in parts. It opens with “Optimum”, meaning the best possible, whose “Opti” links back to OptiScan. Next comes “In Vivo”, Latin for “within the living”, the term clinicians, competitors and product documentation all use. For the final word we tested Check and Touch, the latter because images are captured by simply touching the probe to tissue. We chose Imaging, which completes the phrase and says plainly what the product does.

Our first approved name was IdentiVI. It came from exploring the diagnostic language around the product, words like check and detect, and settled on a play on “identify”, which is what the device helps clinicians do. Inside the name was the acronym iVI, short for in Vivo Imaging, which tied it directly to the tagline. There was also a detail just for the OptiScan team: VI is the Roman numeral for six, so the product followed on from the pre-clinical FIVE series. At trademark clearance, however, we found a similar-sounding name in a related technology field, and we went back to the drawing board.

The final name, InVivage, combines In Vivo and Image. Where IdentiVI kept the field’s language hidden in an acronym, InVivage takes that language openly and turns it into a single word OptiScan can own. The capital V marks where the two roots meet, so clinicians recognise “In Vivo” straight away, but the word itself is new. Its sound also brings a second meaning: InVivage echoes “envisage”, to see or picture something clearly, which is exactly what the product offers inside living tissue. Viv- comes from the Latin for life, and -age finishes the word the way “image” does. The result is a name that sounds like a medical term and at the same time describes what the device does.

The name and tagline now support each other. InVivage compresses In Vivo Imaging into a single word, and the tagline spells it out in full, so the full product name reads OptiScan InVivage, with the company first. The name has since carried the product through clinical studies and its submission to the US FDA.