The Daily Scan

Physicians debate value of 'Most Wired Hospitals' survey

From the Digital Pathology blog: Physicians debate value of 'Most Wired Hospitals' survey:

In a lively panel session Wednesday at the 2008 Physician-Computer Connection Symposium, physician IT leaders discussed the importance of the "Most Wired Hospitals" list - which is based on the annual Most Wired Survey and Benchmarking Study - and disagreed about whether such rankings are useful or simply a marketing tool for hospitals.

"Just how dangerous is this report?" asked William Bria, MD, chairman of the AMDIS board of advisors and chief medical information officer at Shriners Hospitals for Children.

Bria speculated that hospital CEOs and boards of directors might mistakenly believe that the simple installation of healthcare IT would lift quality in a hospital.

"The most wired hospital isn't necessarily the best decision-making organization," he said.

For your consideration...

Aperio Receives FDA Clearance for ER and PR Image Analysis Application

Big news today from Aperio:

Aperio has received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to market the ER and PR image analysis applications available through its patented ScanScope® slide scanning system.  The FDA-cleared immunohistochemistry (IHC) image analysis applications are intended to be used as an aid to pathologists in detecting and quantifying ER (estrogen receptor) and PR (progesterone receptor) protein expressions from digital slide images created by Aperio’s slide scanning systems.

Aperio’s FDA clearance encompasses the company’s complete digital pathology system, including ScanScope scanners for creating digital slide images from microscope slides, the SpectrumTM digital pathology information management system for managing, viewing, and analyzing digital slides, and the specific image analysis applications which perform the automated scoring of ER and PR breast cancer digital slides.

I try not to parrot Aperio press releases too often on this blog, but this really is important; it means that, together with Aperio's previously-cleared Her2 analysis application, we can now offer customers a complete FDA-cleared solution for breast cancer panels.

 

Webicina - medicine in the web 2.0 era

If you're a regular reader you know I'm a fan of Bertalan Mesko, whose ScienceRoll blog is a great source of information (and a frequent link target).  Bertalan has been a leading proponent of what he calls Medicine 2.0, or medicine in the web 2.0 era.

He has recently announced that:

I'm building a bridge between physicians and e-patients. This bridge is called Webicina.com.

Of course online medicine is going to rely on digital representations of medical data. Each medical subdiscipline is being challenged to figure out how best to acquire, view, manage, and distribute the data from their modality in digital form. Aperio is the leader in providing solutions for digitizing Pathology information, viewing and analyzing those data, and distributing them online. We look forward to working with Bertalan on this venture to help physicians and their patients share digital pathology information.

This will be fun to watch evolve!  Stay tuned for more...

World's largest retailer chain store opens telemedicine clinic

Saw this on Keith Kaplan’s blog: World's largest retailer chain store opens telemedicine clinic:

A Wal-Mart store (Supercenter) in Houston has opened a telemedicine-based health care delivery system.

Similar stories have broke recently about health clinics in other large retail outlets such as Target that I have posted about and some have failed within a short time.  Other traditional health care providers, such as Mayo Clinic, as I have reported, have gone off the main campus to establish outreach offices.

I think this will soon expand to the laboratory setting as well with POC and the like. Imagine getting lab results, not only serum chemistries but also reads on tissue and body fluids when you are seen without waiting and see this a future market for laboratories.  Specimens collected and prepared at time of visit can be viewed with telepathology, without travel to central laboratory collection facilities or waiting for results.

Pretty interesting.  Of course Keith works for Mayo, so you know this is being discussed there…  imagine every Walmart has a ScanScope for feeding digital slides to Mayo, for diagnosis… some kind of nurse practitioner on-site is the source of the biopsies, and prepares the slides…  is that farfetched?  Probably.  Still you never know…

Multitouch image viewing on a BIG screen

Youngmoo Kim, a researcher at Drexel University, has developed a big high-resolution multitouch display, and has built a digital slide viewer using Aperio's Image Library (AIL) which responds to multitouch gestures. 

Please check out this video of the display in action, which features Youngmoos colleague and Aperio's customer Michael Feldman:

(click image to play movie)

Pretty cool.  Just shows once again the power of having an open API; no way we would have done this, but by making AIL available it was possible for them to do it pretty easily.

BioImagene raises $26M in expansion capital

BioImagene, a leading provider of affordable digital pathology solutions for cancer diagnosis and preclinical research, today announced the closing of a $26 million series D financing round led by Burrill & Company.  Ascension Health Ventures, National Healthcare Services and existing investors Artiman Ventures and ICCP Ventures also joined the round with strong support.

Congratulations to Mohan Uttarwar and his team; that’s terrific.  Although we are competitors we are also friends, and we certainly want all the companies in our market to continue growing.  There is definitely enough market out there for all of us!

Visual search engine is photographer's best friend

PC Pro notes Visual search engine is photographer's best friend.

A new visual search engine could help photographers keep track of their photographs whenever, and wherever, they appear on the internet.

The TinEye search engine, developed by Canadian company Idee, allows users to search by uploading a picture rather than typing in a keyword. It then conducts a pixel by pixel search across the internet, flagging up all instances of that image even if it's been cropped, merged or digitally altered in some way.

As it matures in consumer applications, this type of technology could also have great promise for content-based retrieval of large images such as digital slides.

The TinEye search engine is still being beta-tested, but you can learn more about it from the online FAQ.

Aperio participates in Relay for Life!

Starting Saturday at 9:00AM and through Sunday at 9:00AM (!), Team Aperio participated in (and sponsored) the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life, Encinitas edition.  This was a wonderful event and a great experience for all who participated, which included a considerable representation of the Vista Aperions.  Aperio not only raised the most money (yay, us!) but by sharing the duties in ½ hour slots we walked continuously throughout the 24 hours, the only team to do so (!!) Congratulations and Thanks especially to Jennifer Sexton and Joan Wallberg who did a terrific job organizing Team Aperio.  Thanks also to Dave Cox for manning his motor home, providing a relief station for participants :)

For those who don’t know, Relay for Life celebrates cancer survivors and memorializes cancer victims, while raising money for cancer research and care for those battling cancer.  Teams representing companies or individuals walk continuously around a quarter mile track for 24 hours.  After dark the track is surrounded by luminaria, candles inside paper bags; the luminaria are each sponsored and carry messages, either congratulating cancer survivors or remembering cancer victims.  Walking along the track in the middle of the night, reading these messages was an incredibly moving experience.  My own favorite was one which began “Dear Grandma, I never knew you but have heard so much about you”.  It was signed Britta, age 8.  It really makes you realize how important our work is, and the work of our customers.

Team Aperio takes its first lap:

Luminaria commemorating survivors and victims light the track at night...

In addition to being a great experience for all who participated, it was an incredibly appropriate effort for Aperio to sponsor, we can all be very proud.

 

3D JPEG2000 shows CT strength at 15:1 compression

HealthImagingNews reports 3D JPEG2000 shows CT strength at 15:1 compression:

A multinational research team from the departments of radiology at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, and Addenbrooke’s Hospital NHS Trust and the University of Cambridge in England, recently conducted a retrospective study comparing a set of compression ratios utilizing 3D JPEG2000 algorithms for emergency department abdominal CT studies. The results of their research were published in this month’s Radiology.

Images were compressed and saved with 3D JPEG2000 at the following compression ratios: 10:1, 12.5:1, and 15:1. After decompression, the images were transferred to a Siemens Leonardo workstation for viewing and interpretation by three board-certified radiologists with six to nine years experience in reading abdominal CT studies.

This is an interesting article; garden variety 2D JPEG2000 has been used in digital pathology almost from the start, because of the large file sizes and need to reduce block sizes for fast remote access, but increasingly pathologists are capturing multiple z-planes for certain sample types, making a 3D compression technology useful.  It is a great sign that these researchers found the results useful for diagnostic purposes in radiology.

PathResBlog: learning pathology

I just came across the PathResBlog ("Life as a Pathology resident"), maintained by an anonymous pathology resident.  First post:

Might as well get things started. This blog is going to be about pathology residency and everything it entails. Most other path blogs I've seen focus on issues facing pathology and interesting cases. I want this one to be more of a window into what a pathology resident's life is like. Most laypeople, and even many physicians, are not entirely sure what all pathologists do, what they are capable of, and what they cannot do. I hope this blog gives a little insight into that.

Pretty interesting point of view.  Please check out her/his latest post on learning pathology:

One challenge facing pathology interns is, well, we have no idea what we're doing. Medical school prepares you to be a clinician -- a general practitioner or a surgeon. Sure, I took a pathology class my second year, but that was more than two years ago, and compared to what a pathologist actually needs to know, that would be like saying an arithmetic class prepared me for upper-level calculus.

...

If that sounds like a lot, it is! I feel overwhelmed, not just with how much I need to know to be a great pathologist, but with how much I need to know just not to feel like an idiot at the microscope. It's gonna be a long four years ...

I'm subscribed, this is really a useful point of view for me, as we're trying to make products which are easy to use but also easy to learn to use.