A Brainy Imaging

In today’s world, imaging has become highly sophisticated.

The use of imaging intelligence is changing the way radiologists look at scans by providing a wealth of information beyond what meets the eye, paving the way toward better diagnosis by processing a wealth of data faster and more efficiently than ever.

“At the end of the day, making a diagnosis requires knowledge of patterns or disease processes,” said Jonathan Goldin, professor of radiology at the University of California, Santa Monica.

“And what we can do now is have an image, have the computer look at the image with us, and go into big data sets and recognize patterns that have looked like that in vast numbers of other cases, so improving our accuracy of diagnosis.”

UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica uses standard acquisition technologies but adds its own algorithms to analyze images quickly, identifying which may be normal or abnormal, and triaging the images in the work flow, he said.

Intelligent Imaging Suites

Elsewhere, intelligent imaging suites are becoming commonly used in breast MRI, for screening the lung disease COPD, and even for creating 3D and 4D images of organs like the heart prior to surgery.

Some leading medical manufacturers in this arena include Vital — a division of Toshiba — which sells its Vitrea Advanced visualization software to enable visualization and analysis of 2D, 3D and 4D images of CT, MRI, PET scans and ultrasound data “contribute to fast, confident analysis and improved patient outcomes,” according to its website.

A second product, VitreaView Universal Viewer “provides images, reports and other key radiologic data across the medical enterprise, supporting a longitudinal and holistic view of the patient’s care record and helping care teams formulate and monitor treatment plans.”

Among Hitachi’s offerings are the Hitachi Content Platform, which offers data storage and management solutions to help deal with a growing volume of unstructured data. The platform works in concert with Pixcelldata Collibio, a web application that helps manage, store, protect and retrieve digitalized pathology images and data.