A Medical Device Daily

The University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC; Rochester) and start-up company T.I.E.S. (Rochester) have entered into a research partnership to evaluate a technology that they say may represent a major advance in medical imaging. T.I.E.S. (for Tomographic Image Enhancement Systems) has patented an image processing system named "Image Surgery," enabling selective focus on a specific organ or region of the body to create more precise side-by -side images.

The company, led by two former systems executives of Eastman Kodak (Rochester), will work with researchers in the URMC Department of Imaging Sciences to apply this technology to patient images. M. Akram Sandhu, PhD, CEO of T.I.E.S., said, "The university has a great deal of research strength and expertise in this field, and we are looking forward to a very productive research partnership."

T.I.E.S. says its technology may overcome the limitations of advanced imaging technologies such as gamma cameras, CT, MRI and PET scanners that reconstruct images by converting a sequence of 2D images, captured by a receptor as it rotates around the patient, into a 3D image.

Radiologist Vaseem Chengazi, MD, PhD, associate professor at the University of Rochester and chief technology officer of T.I.E.S., said that scanners work very well on images that are not moving" but the body is in motion. "The body moves and breathes, the heart beats, the bladder accumulates urine, and so on. Consequently, images of these areas of the body are often marked by artifacts or distortions.

"Radiologists have attempted to compensate for these problems by doing faster scans and then once they have image they filter it to decrease the artifact," Chengazi added, "but these artifacts are already 'baked' into the image by the process of reconstruction." T.I.E.S. technology overcomes this by segmenting the raw data before it is converted into an image, thus enabling the exclusion of objects not of interest and heightening resolution of the remaining target image.

T.I.E.S. was founded in 2003 by Chengazi, Sandhu, K. Bradley Paxton, PhD, and URMC internist Bilal Ahmed, MD. Sandhu and Paxton also are founders of ADI (Rochester), a data quality management company.