When Covidien decided to spin off Hazelwood drug company Mallinckrodt in 2011, Rick Dorshow’s optical-imaging research became something of an orphan.
Dorshow, a PhD physicist, worked for Mallinckrodt here, but his research had been supported by a respiratory-products division that Covidien was keeping. His project, even though it showed promise for diagnosing a wide variety of diseases, was a casualty of the reorganization...