• CMS (St. Louis), a leader in radiation treatment planning and workflow management solutions, has received FDA 510(k) clearance for its new Atlas-Based Autosegmentation (ABAS) product. The clearance allows CMS to immediately begin distributing ABAS for clinical use in the U.S. ABAS is a software application that produces an estimate of the anatomy boundary contours needed to create a radiation treatment plan. The company said ABAS helps save clinicians time by providing a good starting point for image segmentation, or contouring, a time-consuming component of the treatment planning process. It is a stand-alone, vendor-neutral product that communicates using standard DICOM file formats for both input and output. ABAS is compatible with any radiation treatment planning system that can read standard DICOM RT structure set files. CMS is part of the Elekta Group.

• C. R. Bard (Murray Hill, New Jersey) reported the publication of the North American Silver-Coated Endotracheal Tube (NASCENT) clinical study results in the Aug. 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The NASCENT study evaluated the efficacy of the Agento I.C. silver-coated endotracheal tube (ETT) in the reduction of microbiologically confirmed ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). The Agento ETT is designed for the prevention of VAP in patients intubated for 24 hours or longer. As reported in JAMA, the NASCENT study demonstrated that the Agento ETT reduced the incidence of VAP by 36% in the overall study population, with a 48% reduction in the first 10 days of intubation. C.R. Bard makes products in the fields of vascular, urology, oncology and surgical specialty products.

• SonoSite (Bothell, Washington) said it has begun customer shipments of its first major expansion of capabilities for the S Series ultrasound tools. The upgrade adds four transducers covering a wide range of clinical applications to the S Series product line and enables playback of the SonoSite Education Key program training modules. The S Series ultrasound tools acquire the optimal image in seconds with just two controls, packaged in what SonoSite said is the first and only zero-footprint ultrasound solution. S Series ultrasound tools can be carried, mounted on a pole, or fixed on a wall or ceiling. The new transducers include L-25x/ 13-6 transducer for the S-FAST product , P-10x/ 8-4 transducer for the S-ICU and S-Cath products, C-60x/5-2 transducer for the S-MSK product, and SLAx/ 13-6 high frequency linear transducer for the S-Nerve product. SonoSite is a global leader in hand-carried ultrasound for the point of care.

• Vermillion (Fremont, California), a molecular diagnostics company, reported the publication of data supporting its peripheral artery disease (PAD) diagnostic program. The results were published in the August issue of the journal Vascular Medicine. The study was led by John Cooke, MD, PhD, professor of medicine at Stanford University (Stanford, California) and involved researchers at Mt. Sinai Medical Center (New York), Stanford and Vermillion. Vermillion has entered into an exclusive license agreement with Stanford to develop and commercialize the PAD biomarker panel.