Exclusive article for EMRIndustry by Dennis Hung
Upcoming Changes to the Medical Imaging Process
While doctors and surgeons have incredible expertise, they would never succeed if they couldn’t see their patients’ maladies. In that sense, medical imaging is critical. The process makes use of various machines to build visual representations of the body, so that tissues and organs can be examined before a procedure even starts. Currently, it’s a key method to diagnose treatments and start the battle against a disease. The technology isn’t without its limits, however, so some issues can still slip by undetected. Fortunately, advances in the field may bring some much-needed revolutions to medical imaging.
Smoothly Storing Information
With such critical information to be had from X-rays or CAT scans, medical professionals need to keep their patients’ information tucked in a safe place. A vendor neutral archive, or VNA, makes that process much simpler. While data from medical imaging can quickly pile up into an unmanageable mess, a VNA can store that data, standardize the format, and make it easier to transfer across different systems. The core issue is that VNAs may not have the adoption rate needed to create smoother communications between other machines and professionals.
Fortunately, that might change in the near future. Not only are companies planning to have VNAs become more commonplace, but the technology itself will become more efficient. FUJIFILM Medical Systems recently released a new type of VNA, Synapse version 6.0, as a means to create a secure, long-lived system that presents its users with scalable storage of their data. The company hopes that future IT advances will help medical imaging evolve, along with medicine at large.
A Virtual Experience
2016 has already seen the release of several virtual reality headsets, and tech enthusiasts have sung praises about their effectiveness. Others have noted the sheer potential of VR, with various organizations testing the applications already. The medical field, for example, has used VR to give students a virtual demonstration of a live surgery. Given that the headsets can project pictures to their users, it may only be a matter of time before the potential gets tapped for medical imaging.
In the past, medical students learned by viewing two-dimensional pictures of a body part and building a mental replica of it. With VR, the doctors of the future can skip that step. A headset can create a lifelike image of an organ so that a doctor can interact with a facsimile of the real thing. Clinical trials run at Stanford University Medical Center have implied that VR can lower the planning time for a surgery by as much as 40%, while the accuracy of said surgery rises by 10%. The major stumbling block right now is that VR headsets are prohibitively expensive, but that issue won’t last if the technology takes root.
An Optical Breakthrough
The medical field makes use of optoacoustic imaging to analyze human bodies. By firing laser pulses into tissues, the absorbed energy will turn into heat, and as a result cause an ultrasonic emission that equipment can pick up. Converting those emissions into images gives doctors a view of the targeted tissue, at least in theory. In practice, the current transducers used to detect the emissions lack the efficiency needed to work with laser lights, and can lead to unclear images.
Fortunately, TomoWave Laboratories may have a solution. Its engineers have developed a sensitive ultrasonic detector, which interacts much more efficiently with laser beams. Without the interference, medical equipment can obtain better results with each scan. If the new detectors gain traction, then creating images of blood vessels will become far easier.
A Healthier Tomorrow
Medical imaging is a powerful and important tool, but in its current form, it’s not the be-all and end-all. There are still ways to improve the technology, though patients can rest assured knowing that the experts are making progress. Perhaps in five years’ time, the problems of today will become a thing of the past.
