A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Royal Philips Electronics (Chicago) and BrainLAB (Munich, Germany) reported that they will collaborate on the integration of intra-operative angiography and image-guided surgery (IGS) in a pact that will drive the compatibility of these technologies in the operating room (OR) environment.

The companies said that the integration of angiography and IGS will be designed to provide surgeons with real-time information during interventions for more precise surgical procedures. Image-guided intra-operative angiography could enhance both neurosurgery and spinal surgery and extend the classical range of cardiovascular surgery, they said.

BrainLAB will develop interfaces between Philips' angiographic imaging systems and the BrainLAB VectorVision system for the automatic registration of intra-operatively acquired angiographic data so that surgeons can upload data sets into the IGS system without additional manual steps. During surgery, the position of the patient and surgical instruments is tracked in real time through BrainLAB software.

In other agreement news:

• Digirad (Poway, California) has signed a letter of agreement with the University of Chicago Medical Center to deliver cardiac diagnostic services to Chicago-area physicians through Digirad's centers of influence program, which includes seven U.S. academic medical institutions.

Digirad and the medical center will offer services and expertise to primary-care physicians in the Chicago area seeking to expand their practices with in-office imaging. Digirad will bring equipment and personnel into physicians' offices to perform imaging procedures, with the images interpreted by medical center physicians and the results sent electronically to a referring physician.

• Smiths Medical MD (St. Paul, Minnesota) said it would distribute the FreeStyle Navigator Continuous Glucose Monitoring System from Abbott Diabetes Care (Alameda, California). Financial terms were not disclosed.

The FreeStyle Navigator system is designed to continually record interstitial fluid glucose levels for the purpose of improving diabetes management.

• Aperio Technologies (Vista, California), a provider of digital pathway systems, reported that it has been an ongoing collaborator with Burnham Institute for Medical Research (La Jolla, California) to use Asperio's ScanScope slide scanning system and quantitative immunohistochemistry tools to assist in the validation and clinical translation of Burnham's cancer biomarkers.

Aperio said it worked with Burnham researchers to develop advanced image analysis algorithms for Burnham's dual or multicolor stainings in histology and immunohistochemistry to facilitate the simultaneous measurement of protein expression, cell typing, or protein colocalization.

• Premier Purchasing Partners (Charlotte, North Carolina) reported an agreement with Toshiba America Medical Systems (TAMS; Tustin, California) for MRI products and point of sale service agreements. The contract is available to acute and continuum of care members of the Premier healthcare alliance.