A Medical Device Daily
IT systems maker Sectra (Link ping, Sweden) reported it will add trauma templates to its orthopedic product line-up as part of a new agreement with Synthes (Solothurn, Switzerland).
Sectra will add Synthes’ 1,600 trauma templates to its 33,000 digital templates which come from 20 other orthopedic implant manufacturers.
“This agreement with Synthes enables us to extend our product offering within orthopedics to also meet the needs of trauma centers and emergency care hospitals, an important part of the U.S. orthopedic market, said Brian Anderson, VP of marketing at Sectra North America. “Trauma surgeons can leverage Sectra’s orthopedic solution to pre-operatively plan for surgery by accessing a suite of automated tools and digital templates, increasing the accuracy and speed of the pre-operative planning process.”
Sectra’s OrthoStation, an orthopedic planning package, includes image processing capabilities and a set of guides for pre-operative planning of hip and knee surgery.
In other agreement news:
• American Type Culture Collection (ATCC, Manassas, Virginia) ) reported a new alliance with The Valley Hospital (Ridgewood, New Jersey) to speed the development and validation of biomarkers for the early detection and treatment of pancreatic cancer.
Valley Hospital will provide ATCC with tissue from patients whose pancreatic tumors were resected, as well as stored blood and clinical perspectives on validation and application of the collaboration’s biomarker discoveries. ATCC will subject the pancreatic cancer samples to a biomarker discovery platform, including integrated proteomics, genomics, bioinformatics and an immunology paradigm.
The collaboration is focused on finding biomolecules that enable early detection, therapeutic monitoring and potentially treatment of pancreatic cancer. ATCC scientists also will use the ATCC Cell Biology Collection to test for the presence or absence of various biomarkers across a wide range of cell lines.
About 30,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer are diagnosed in the U.S. each year, but because it is asymptomatic during early stages, pancreatic cancer has the highest fatality rate of all cancers.
“Early detection is often a key to positive cancer disease prognosis, and that is especially true for pancreatic tumors,” said Dr. Ganepola Ganepola, medical director at the Valley Hospital Center for Cancer Research and Genomic Medicine and developer of the specimen bank. “Discovering indicators that predict pancreatic cancer would be a major step forward in lowering the disease’s lethality.”
• Amphion Medical Solutions, (Madison, Wisconsin) has partnered with Avista (Spokane, Washington) to create and maintain software used to deliver medical record transcription and coding services.
Amphion provides solutions to support its customers with a team of medical language specialists and credentialed coders. While the company uses its own software to support its service delivery, software development is not a core business focus. It said that after “a costly and off-putting experience with a high-profile software consulting firm,” it turned to Avista.
Amphion is developing a web-based health document platform and says it is anticipating the electronic medical record environment to impact the services it delivers.
Amphion specializes in medical coding and transcription.