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Solutions : Case Studies

Case Studies

Cardiology Cockpit Cruises Cardiac Images for Collaboration, Confidence, Clinical Care

By: Eric E. Harrison, M.D., National Director of Cardiology, IASIS Healthcare Inc.

In the aviation industry, changing from mechanical flight control systems to fly-by-wire electronic systems improved the capability and safety of airplanes. Like aviation, medicine has witnessed similar technological breakthroughs. In the field of cardiology alone, we’ve seen imaging technology take us from the X-rays and electrocardiograms (ECGs) of yesterday to today’s 2-, 3-, and 4-dimension ECGs, CTs, MRIs and PET/CT fusion scans. Much as pilots can command every component of an airplane from their cockpit seat, I am able to diagnose my patient’s disease from a single workstation.

As a cardiovascular imaging specialist at IASIS Healthcare’s Memorial Hospital of Tampa, Fla., I saw the tremendous value of the advanced visualization tools used on multimodality workstations in radiology and I wanted to bring these tools to my cardiovascular department. IASIS has had great success with McKesson’s Horizon Medical Imaging radiology picture archiving and communications system (PACS) solution, so we turned to McKesson again.

The result is the implementation of Horizon Cardiology, a cardiovascular information solution (CVIS) from McKesson, combined with Vital Images’ Vitrea Enterprise Suite and TomTec’s 4-D Cardio-View. This best-of-breed integrated solution is what I call the “cardiology cockpit,” putting all the controls a cardiologist needs for diagnosis in one location. From this cockpit, I can see the complete cardiac history of a patient. All multimodality images — including multidimensional reconstructions, waveforms and reports — are on a single workstation, enhancing my ability to access, review, compare, manipulate and share them, whether I’m at my hospital or 2,300 miles away at another IASIS facility. Collaboration, confidence and clinical care have been improved.

Fast Loading of Large Volumetric Datasets Using Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series Multiprocessors Performance

With the ongoing advancement of image acquisition technologies utilized in healthcare, imaging datasets continue to get larger. Large runoff studies can easily reach 3,000 slices and multi-phase cardiac datasets now reach 10,000 slices. Loading such datasets can require a significant amount of time which may negatively impact patient care.

In order to reduce the time spent loading such datasets, a joint project was undertaken by Intel and Vital Images to leverage the potential of Vital Images' volumetric compression and the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. Utilizing these technologies, dataset loading speeds exceeding 3,000 slices per second are achievable. The result is faster workflow and a positive impact on patient care.

"In critical patient care situations like a stroke, time is essential. Significant technology advancements like the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series combined with our Vitrea® fX brain perfusion application enable the fast processing of large amounts of image data to provide doctors with quantitative results related to patients' regional cerebral blood volume (rCBV), mean transit time (MTT) and regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF)." - Vikram Simha, Chief Technical Officer, Vital Images, Inc.

Royal Bournemouth Hospital Increases Physician Productivity, BroadensAccess to Advanced Visualizations and CT Scans, and Improves PatientCare with Vitrea® Enterprise Suite

The Royal Bournemouth Hospital was already using workstations from Vital Images for accessing clinical images from its existing Toshiba Aquilion 16 CT scanner, and was extremely impressed with the solution, as well as with the quality of Vital Images’ support. The hospital chose to upgrade to the Vitrea Enterprise Suite because it offered all the features that the hospital was looking for, and because of the hospital’s previous experience with Vital Images.

The hospital also chose the Vitrea Enterprise Suite because radiologists were already familiar and comfortable with Vital Images technology, and so would not have to learn a new system. The Vitrea Enterprise Suite also worked well with the Aquilion ONE. In addition, the ease of use of Vitrea Enterprise Suite would improve doctor productivity.