A Medical Device Daily

AT&T (San Francisco) reported a three-year optical and data services contract with California Advanced Imaging Medical Associates (CAIMA; San Francisco Bay), a radiology practice serving hospitals in the western San Francisco Bay Area and throughout the U.S. AT&T will serve as the primary provider of data and networking services, delivering its Opt-E-Man service, AT&T Managed Internet Service (MIS) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) services.

With a combination of ATM and Opt-E-Man service, a fully managed switched Ethernet service, CAIMA will be able to send and receive medical images among its 92 locations throughout the U.S., including Alaska and Singapore, the company said. The wireless area network (WAN) will sustain CAIMA’s high-volume data traffic via the converged network infrastructure, which also aligns with AT&T’s convergence strategy. The solution will also deliver increased bandwidth to support CAIMA’s international teleradiology network, enabling CAIMA’s radiologists to deliver enhanced service to their patients for improved patient care.

Additionally, AT&T MIS, a dedicated Internet connection, will support secure real-time access to the Internet across the network, 24 hours a day, the company said. And with ATM service, according to AT&T, CAIMA will be able to consolidate MRI, CT and other patient scans on a high-speed network for remote viewing, improving the response time from the radiologists and increasing efficiency throughout the organization.

“Speed and accuracy are imperative to providing superior patient care in the medical field, so we needed a solution capable of supporting fast and reliable data transfer,” said Peter Osuna, director of IT at CAIMA. “The solution delivered by AT&T will support increased bandwidth, which is required for the quick transfer of MRI, CT and other patient scans, and guaranteed data arrival over the secure network, which enables our radiologists to offer enhanced patient care.”

CAIMA’s radiologists provide a range of diagnostic imaging services including neurologic imaging, orthopedic imaging, three-dimensional computed tomography, ultrafast MRI, and interventional and routine radiology services, the company said.

In other grants/contracts news:

• The Coriell Institute for Medical Research (Camden, New Jersey) has been awarded a $3.1 million contract from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI; Bethesda, Maryland) to establish a Sample Repository for Human Genetic Research.

The repository will house samples collected for the International HapMap Project. The NHGRI initially worked with the Human Genetic Cell Repository at Coriell, sponsored by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), to establish, store and distribute the cell lines and DNA studied to develop the HapMap, a comprehensive description of the patterns of human genetic variation that has been placed in the public domain.

In the first phase of developing the HapMap, researchers mapped the common patterns of variation in the human genome, called “haplotypes,” using DNA from cell lines prepared from blood samples collected from 270 volunteers from four major world populations: people in Utah descended from individuals from Northern and Western Europe; the Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria; Han Chinese in Beijing, China; and Japanese in Tokyo. The cell lines from the Yoruba, Han Chinese and Japanese samples were prepared at Coriell. The samples from people with Northern and Western European ancestry had previously been prepared for the Centre d’Etude du Polymorphisme Humain (CEPH) and are part of the NIGMS Repository at Coriell.

The International HapMap Project produced a resource with 3.9 million single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs typed in each of the samples, the patterns of SNPs providing important information about human variation.

In addition to assisting in the identification of genetic factors involved in disease, the HapMap can help pinpoint genetic variations that may affect the response of people to medications, toxic substances and environmental factors. The HapMap may also be used to find genetic factors that contribute to good health, such as those that protect against infectious diseases or promote longevity.