A Medical Device Daily
Intermagnetics General (Latham, New York) reported that its subsidiary, Invivo (Gainesville, Florida), has been awarded a $500,000 Department of Defense grant to develop an integrated hardware and software system that will enable high-resolution MRI of traumatic brain injuries and promote more effective diagnosis and treatment in many difficult cases. Invivo is partnering with the Office of Naval Research on the project.
Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Florida) formally unveiled the award at Invivo's headquarters yesterday.
"Brain injury is the second leading cause of battlefield deaths, and this grant is intended to provide a means of diagnosis and treatment that, in many cases, is not totally reliable under current procedures," Stearns said. "We owe it to our wounded military personnel returning from combat duty to have the best possible care available."
Tom Schubert, chief technology officer of Invivo, said: "We believe Invivo's advanced MRI radio frequency coils, which enable highly detailed organ-specific imaging, combined with modifications to our innovative DynaCad computer-aided diagnostic system will provide the solution the military is seeking."
Schubert added that CT is the main radiological tool for diagnosing traumatic brain injury patients but limited "to visualizing fractures and significant hematomas but is ineffective in diagnosing more subtle injuries." He said it does not provide fine soft-tissue discrimination to investigate small white matter lesions common in traumatic or concussive brain injury and cannot be used in the investigation of subarachnoidal hemorrhage.
Schubert noted that the Invivo solution would be used in the highest-field MRI systems available, such as those powered by the 3.0 Tesla magnets from Intermagnetics.
Invivo said that, working with the Office of Naval Research, it expects to deliver evaluation models of both the advanced imaging hardware and the analysis software this year.
In contract news:
• Ophthalmic Imaging Systems (OIS; Sacramento, California), a provider of ophthalmic digital imaging systems, reported a contract with Kaiser Foundation Health Plan to implement OIS's Ophthalmic Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) for Kaiser Permanente. The contract, totaling $1.35 million, includes PACS hardware, software, implementation and training.
OIS will provide the platform for the Diabetic Retinopathy Screening project in Kaiser Permanente's 12 regional centers throughout Southern California.
OIS's Ophthalmic PACS software enables medical staff to electronically access new and archived images from different locations in seconds, resulting in more timely and efficient patient diagnoses and reporting. It also simplifies the management of patients' archived records, diagnostic tests and outcomes reporting. The system will integrate with Kaiser Permanente centers' existing digital imaging capabilities, including 57 digitally enabled fundus cameras, located within the 12 medical centers in Southern California and their satellite offices.
Once implemented, the system will be completely integrated with Kaiser Permanente's existing infrastructure and information systems, including image acquisition, review, analysis, and reporting, short- and long-term storage, archiving, and disaster recovery.
OIS, a majority-owned subsidiary of MediVision Medical Imaging (Yokneam, Israel), manufactures digital imaging systems and informatics solutions for the eye care market.
• Aperio Technologies (Vista, California), a provider of digital pathology and virtual microscopy systems, reported an exclusive license agreement with Zoomify (Santa Cruz, California) to resell the third-party web viewing software to the digital pathology market.
Zoomify's software enables Internet viewing of industry-standard digital slide files from any standard web server. Digital slide files are multi-gigabyte images of entire microscope slides that are created by a microscope slide scanner such as Aperio's ScanScope. Zoomify's technology is used for the digital slide gallery on Aperio's website at aperio.com/gallery.
• Bio-Imaging Technologies (Newtown, Pennsylvania) reported that it has entered into an agreement with the division of image processing at the department of radiology at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC; Leiden, the Netherlands). LUMC will develop clinical software for the quantitative analysis of CT angiography for Bio-Imaging's exclusive use in clinical trials.
The CTA software will be tailored to the needs of Bio-Imaging's use of the software within the highly regulated clinical trials industry, including the need for comprehensive reporting and complete audit trails.