A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Alliance Imaging (Anaheim, California), a national provider of diagnostic imaging services, reported that it has acquired 100% of the outstanding stock of PET Scans of America (PSA; Fort Lee, New Jersey), a mobile provider of positron emission tomography (PET) and PET/CT (computed tomography) services, primarily to hospitals.

PSA operates PET and PET/CT systems in 13 states.

The purchase price consisted of about $44 million in cash for the stock of PSA, financed through a combination of capital leases and borrowings under the company’s revolving line of credit. Annualized revenue from the PSA acquisition is expected to contribute about $20 million, Alliance said.

“This acquisition further grows our PET and PET/CT business both in scale and geographical reach and complements our strategy of providing imaging services primarily to hospitals and health systems,” said Paul Viviano, chairman of the board and CEO of Alliance.

Alliance is a national provider of shared-service and fixed-site diagnostic imaging services. It provides imaging services primarily to hospitals and other healthcare providers on a shared and full-time service basis, in addition to operating a growing number of fixed-site imaging centers. The company had 465 diagnostic imaging systems, including 352 MRI systems and 57 PET or PET/CT systems, and more than 1,000 clients in 43 states as June 30.

Medicsight (London), a majority owned subsidiary of Delaware-incorporated Medicsight Inc., a developer of computer-aided detection (CAD) technologies and software, and Viatronix (Stony Brook, New York), a developer of diagnostic 3-D imaging software, reported signing a non-exclusive partnership agreement to incorporate Medicsight’s CAD products, Medicsight ColonCAD API and Medicsight LungCAD API, into Viatronix’s V3D medical imaging workstations.

The agreement will allow current and new users of Viatronix’s V3D-Colon and V3D-Explorer modules to add Medicsight ColonCAD API and LungCAD API image analysis software tools. Users of the integrated software will be able to interactively view Medicsight’s ColonCAD polyp identification marks or LungCAD lung nodule identification marks while viewing a virtual fly-through of the colon or viewing 3-D computed tomography lung images using real-time volume rendering.

The combined Viatronix/Medicsight imaging system is expected to reach the market in 4Q05. A pre-release version of V3D-Colon integrated with Medicsight ColonCAD API will debut at the Sixth International Symposium on Virtual Colonoscopy in Boston.

The V3D-Colon system, along with V3D-Explorer integrated with Medicsight LungCAD API, will be displayed in its full commercial form at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (Oak Brook, Illinois) in Chicago from Nov. 27-Dec. 2.