One of the driving forces in medical imaging is the innovation that is taking place in medical imaging software. I previously wrote about this from the 2010 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) meeting.
As an example, medical imaging software can now accurately align PET and CT or even MR images from any major manufacturer and fuse them together, even if they have been acquired at a different time or place. Combined PET/CT scanners have been around for a few years, but Siemens recently launched the first PET/MRI scanner, which really required some hurdles to be overcome and combined with the possibility of fusing the images, provides some interesting improvements in diagnostic capabilities.
Tri-modal fusion of an MRI scan with a PET/CT scan, or fusion of standalone PET to MRI offers non-expert medical imaging centers the potential to generate diagnostic insights that can help with oncology tumor assessment, staging and delineation.
Innovations in Medical Imaging from Mirada Medical Software
A company at the forefront of this is Mirada Medical Software. BioClinica recently adopted their software to enable us to offer even more powerful and robust medical imaging analysis tools for quantification and tracking of findings in clinical trials. MD Anderson Cancer Center announced late last year that they had adopted the software, so we are in good company.
When we compared competing medical imaging software products, what made the Mirada software particularly appealing to me was:
- Its robust history of development
- Ease of integration with a database
- Application to multiple therapeutic areas such as oncology, neurology, cardiovascular
- Ability to undertake review with multiple time points showing
Mirada’s latest XD3 software release includes volumetric CT segmentation in addition to tools for CT/PET and MR/PET to facilitate both anatomical and functional response tracking.
Picture Credit: Mirada Medical Software
Some of the advanced features include:
- Support for multi-timepoint gated, multi-sequence MR, and multi-phase CT data
- Software based PET/MR
- Support for unlimited number of simultaneous follow-up scan review
- Support for standard disease response quantification workflows such as RECIST and PERCIST
- Built in support for disease specific workflows such as Head and Neck and Melanoma
- Data QC for automatically warning for inter-scan variations
- Voxel intensity classification tool for identifying tissue based on density within a region
- Casebook for presenting volumetric DICOM datasets in Microsoft PowerPoint presentations
You can find out more information about their products by visiting the Mirada Medical website.
The Mirada software is already being integrated into our central lab workflow. I’m excited about the additional functionality and capabilities this will offer clients. If you’d like any more information about these innovations in medical imaging software, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Dr. Miller will attend the 19th International Bone Densitometry Workshop August 20– 24, 2012 in Breckenridge, Colorado. BioClinica is proud to sponsor this event.