Improving the Flow

Modern CT, MR and PET-CT scanners have been designed to improve diagnostic efficacy to address the needs of patients being treated. One of the barriers to fully achieving these goals has been the tools available for reading these studies to quickly arrive at a diagnosis and present the results in an efficient way. There have been advancements in the interpretation tools and workflow processes to achieve better outcomes, but these still lack the speed and efficiency to fully maximize results. This is especially true since a modern healthcare enterprise is usually a distributed entity, and highly specialized professionals work in multiple locations using disparate information systems and interpretation tools.

Smart and scalable tools are required to provide radiologists and clinicians access to medical imaging data and clinical applications throughout the enterprise, regardless of their location, in an efficient, cost-effective and easy-to-use manner. Multiple physicians should be able to view all original and processed data in as few mouse clicks as possible, in 2D, 3D or 4D. These tools improve decision-making and accelerate treatment plans for the patient .

The right solution is no longer a future dream; but hospitals need to carefully choose their imaging solution. Confronted with today’s data explosion and extrapolating a few years into the future, you soon realize that you need a truly scalable visualization solution that will grow seamlessly with the demands. Server-based thin client solutions, such as Visage CS from Visage Imaging, offer one central, server-based solution for all visualization and interpretation needs throughout the enterprise, thus providing data access to more users and better utilizing resources.

Furthermore, thin client visualization systems minimize impact on the hospital IT infrastructure and can be plugged into an existing RIS/PACS solution. Only thin client solutions can fully take advantage of the massive number of slices that are generated by state-of-the-art modalities, since images remain on the server at all times, and only required application-dependent content is streamed in a ‘smart’ fashion to the concurrent end users across the enterprise. This process avoids network bandwidth peaks, minimizes data inconsistencies, and maximizes the availability and usage ratio of the tools you have invested in.

Better focus

From an economic standpoint, the ability to make the data available more broadly to clinicians and physicians releases the radiology technician to focus on the actual scanning step. By doing so, the time between scans is reduced, thus increasing the return and reimbursements to the institution. If a facility has three radiology technicians sharing time between scanning and processing, and having the data accessible to physicians, these resources can now focus their time on scanning.

For example, one patient can be scanned every 20 minutes. Add a second technician and the time is reduced to 15 minutes, a third reduces the time to process a patient to 11 minutes. The obvious result is a doubling the number of scans being done without adding resources while increasing the reimbursable activities.

In addition to the benefit of having data and tools available anytime, anywhere, premium thin client solutions such as Visage CS offer smart clinical applications spanning many specialties including vascular, nuclear, cardiac function, neurology, oncology, and orthopaedics. As an example, multi-phase functional cardiac or brain perfusion analysis can be processed and diagnosed remotely from a different site or even from the comfort of your home office.

At Visage Imaging, our goal is to provide effective tools that will allow for better workflow. Our Visage CS system uses off the shelf components and our powerful software to provide productive and fully scalable systems designed to protect the investment. It is our goal to help users to better deal with the ever changing economic landscape while continuing to be sensitive to patients’ needs.

Visage Imaging also offers the unique integrated combination of a scalable server-based thin client solution for clinical use, with the leading research application and development platform in bio-medical research. Amira satisfies the most demanding needs for working with clinical or preclinical image data, nuclear data, optical or electron microscopy imagery, molecular models, simulation data on finite element models, and all types of multidimensional datasets. This powerful combination of tools can take clinical research to unmatched levels of productivity.