Nuclear Medicine Imaging Portal Allows Access from Virtually any Networked Computer

A full range of nuclear medicine (NM) applications now provides comprehensive processing and review capabilities at a level normally reserved exclusively for dedicated NM workstations. New NM solutions have been designed to increase diagnostic confidence, enhance patient comfort, augment physician confidence, simplify clinical workflow and reduce lifecycle costs.

At the 2012 SNM (Society of Nuclear Imaging), annual meeting, held June 9-13, 2012, in Miami (FL, USA), Philips Healthcare (Best, the Netherlands) presented its range of nuclear medicine (NM) applications for IntelliSpace Portal, adding to its existing range of computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), and multimodality applications.

“The nuclear medicine applications portfolio for the IntelliSpace Portal is designed to help nuclear medicine professionals improve their workflow and evaluate a patient’s progress,” said Jay Mazelsky, senior vice president and general manager, Philips computed tomography and nuclear medicine. “As a leader in nuclear medicine, Philips strives to provide solutions for our customers that improve collaboration in order to provide enhanced care for patients.”

The NM applications portfolio for IntelliSpace Portal now allows NM technologists and physicians to process, review and analyze images from single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), SPECT/CT, positron emission tomography/CT (PET/CT), and PET/MR, and then share images and findings with referring physicians using cutting edge collaboration tools. The clinical applications on IntelliSpace Portal can be accessed from virtually any networked computer--allowing clinicians the flexibility to collaboratively evaluate findings at the hospital or remotely.

“The IntelliSpace Portal nuclear medicine features have drastically changed the way we treat patients,” said Janusz Kikut, MD, director of nuclear medicine and PET/CT, Fletcher Allen Health Care (Burlington, VT, USA). “The features now allow us to better monitor change in disease status using the nuclear medicine imaging modalities that are often important to diagnosis. And, since we can access IntelliSpace Portal away from our campus, we’ve been able to improve our workflow with radiologists and seamlessly communicate the nuclear medicine results to referring physicians.”

Since the IntelliSpace Portal is built on a scalable server-client platform, it also offers the flexibility to efficiently add concurrent users as well as new clinical applications. This virtually eliminates the need for costly and time consuming upgrades across multiple workstations. The IntelliSpace Portal can also interface with Philips or non-Philips picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), providing direct access to the comprehensive range of NM review and processing applications.

Key NM application features include (1) NM Review: a comprehensive and integrated review application for all types of NM and fused data, e.g., planar (dynamic, static, gated), SPECT (includes gated SPECT), SPECT/CT, PET/CT, PET/MR; (2) NM processing application suite: a comprehensive range of organ-specific applications; (3) Astonish Reconstruction, which increases departmental efficiency with cardiac imaging in half the time; (4) multimodality tumor tracking, which supports side-by-side comparisons of serial CT, MR, and PET studies to assess the effectiveness of cancer treatment; (5) Prefetch, which determines studies that need to be compared to previous scans and makes them available on Portal for review and comparison; lastly (6) Collaboration Viewer, which allows for fast and efficient processing of SPECT, SPECT/CT, and PET/CT images combined with collaboration between medical specialists and referrals.

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