ROCHESTER, MN – Two major forces in healthcare – one well-known for clinical innovation and the other a significant healthcare IT vendor – are joining to pursue medical imaging research and ensure it’s usable in real-world clinical settings.
The Mayo Clinic and IBM Corp. announced the initiative last month, pledging to expand a 2007 collaborative effort between the two organizations so that cutting-edge imaging technology can be used in more medical facilities.
The facility, called the Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center, is located on the Mayo
campus in Rochester, Minn. The site also will enable research on products from other imaging companies.
The effort is already drawing interest from industry leaders such as Siemens and the McKesson Corp.
“We’re trying to pull everyone together and help them build this next generation of tools that will help improve quality and productivity,” said Bill Rapp, chief technology officer for IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences.
The center will apply research and associated technologies to cut the time needed to get results from algorithms that can help clinicians with radiological assessments.
Advances in radiological technology has greatly increased the number of images that clinicians must handle, said Bradley Erickson, MD, head of Mayo’s radiology informatics lab.
“When I started reading digital images, a typical exam was in the tens of images,” he said. “Now, an exam can be in the thousands of images, and the time given to interpret an exam actually is going down. The hope of the center is to be able to use computers to extract information and key images in large exams, and make radiologists do our jobs more efficiently and better.”
Algorithms help clinicians make better use of radiological exams, but they often only work in a test setting and can’t be adopted in clinical settings, said Rapp.
For example, during an MRI exam that takes a few minutes, any patient movement is likely to result in a blurred image. While algorithms may exist to correct for that patient movement, it’s a computer-intensive adjustment that takes time.
“If we can get that down to minutes instead of hours, we may be able to get a determination before a patient leaves as to whether we need to repeat the test,” he said. “If it takes 12 hours to run the algorithm, it’s not clinically applicable.”
The new center will use the latest in high-end imaging platforms and computational hardware, including IBM’s new computing system based on the Cell Broadband Engine – technology used in the latest Playstation gaming systems that can handle computations at high speeds, handling multiple tasks simultaneously. The center also uses blade technology to aggregate computing power more cheaply and efficiently.
Some of the research being done this year includes work on image-guided tumor ablation, to assist clinicians in pinpointing and maximizing the efficiency of heat transfer probes used to destroy cancer tumors.
The center also hopes to attract research grants for further investigations. The hope is that the work will not only grow assets in imaging informatics at IBM and Mayo, including potential new graphics tools for visualization, but also lead to development of a software library for advanced medical imaging on high-end computer systems.