MIMvista Selects IDL as Development Platform
for Advanced Medical Imaging System
The New Frontier of Medical Imaging
One of today's most challenging medical diagnostic tasks for doctors is to synthesize information from the numerous types of available imagery and perform faster, more accurate patient diagnoses. IDL plays a critical role in addressing this challenge through work being done by MIMvista.
Reducing the complexity of analyzing visual data from multiple modalities such as PET, MRI, SPECT and CT was a research problem that attracted the attention of Dr. A. Dennis Nelson, founder of MIMvista and physician at the University Hospitals of Cleveland. A pioneer in the medical imaging field with more than 25 years of experience in the areas of clinical and research oriented medical image processing, Dr. Nelson developed a solution to this medical imaging problem with the help of IDL. His groundbreaking image analysis application, called MIM™ image display system, is widely recognized as a significant advancement for the registration, fusion, and display of medical images from multiple modalities. Once he realized the widespread need for the image display system, Dr. Nelson founded MIMvista, Corp. to distribute MIM and continue to enhance its capabilities.
The MIM Image Display System
"Our goals were to develop a more powerful processing and analysis system for the viewing and fusion of medical images, and to combine those capabilities with a user interface that was easy for doctors to use," said Pete Simmelink, operations manager at MIMvista. "IDL software gave Dr. Nelson and the MIMvista team the tools we needed to achieve both of these difficult goals in a very cost-effective way and with a very aggressive development timeline."
Using IDL, Dr. Nelson and the MIMvista team designed a Windows-based image display system that enables radiologists, medical researchers and other doctors to easily display and manually overlay tomographic images. MIM allows the operator to rotate, translate and align images anatomically, and match the geometric position of the images relative to one another. This allows doctors to more easily combine visual data from multiple modalities, thereby significantly increasing the speed and accuracy of diagnoses. |
|
 |
MIM is used for the general viewing of DICOM PET, DICOM NM, DICOM MR, DICOM CT, DICOM US, ECAT PET, Interfile and ICON imagery - large imagery files that can range in size from 5MB to 200MB. MIM maintains original scan volume accuracy while avoiding the time required for pre-calculation of resized image volumes. It is also significantly faster than methods that require translation and rotation of the entire image volume. MIM allows the operator to control three orthogonal slice display view ports of each volume and align image volumes by translation and rotation of these view ports with respect to the original image volume orientation.
Choosing IDL
"IDL was the clear choice as our development platform for MIM because it works so well with arrays and medical images," said Simmelink. "IDL's Object Graphics, high level array procedures and math functions saved the development team a tremendous amount of time and helped us achieve a significant advancement in medical imaging."
"We handle all development related to MIM with a tight team of just five programmers, which is possible because IDL's development tools take care of so many of the complex elements we would otherwise have to build from scratch," said Simmelink. "IDL's Object Graphics have been particularly useful for our recent work developing the latest version - MIM 3.0. I would estimate that IDL saved us about six months of development time on that latest development project alone. That probably saved us at least two hundred thousand dollars."
"Technical support from RSI has been very helpful during our development efforts," said Simmelink. "We use the Internet news groups extensively, and that has been a great resource for our team. RSI is very active in the news groups, gets answers to the user community very quickly and demonstrates a strong commitment to supporting its customers."
Helping Doctors and Their Patients
MIMvista's development efforts have been a tremendous success, with a MIM user base that has grown from 30 original sites in 2002 to more than 250 users at 120 sites today.
Simmelink added, "The feedback from doctors who use our image display system has been very positive. With MIM, doctors are able to do previously complex image fusion with ease and speed, which is a tremendous asset when analyzing complex visual data about cancerous tumor growth and other serious medical conditions. MIM is an advancement that is having a significant positive impact on patient care and outcomes, and IDL has played an important role in making it possible."
For more information about the MIM Image Display System, visit http://www.MIMvista.com.
|
