What's In a Name?

I thought a good place to start the conversation was to begin by telling you how IXICO’s name came about. Having surveyed a number of our competitor’s websites, I could not help but notice a striking similarity between all of their names, the word ‘imaging’, the prefix ‘bio’ or indeed any clinical related words featured quite heavily. And then of course there is IXICO. To an outsider, like me (I only joined the company two weeks ago), the name did not give the slightest clue as to what the company did. So this is what I found out.

IXICO’s journey started from a scientific project based on the Grid to create the Dynamic Brain Atlas. Derek Hill, founding CEO of IXICO and one of the key scientists behind the project, likened the Grid to a ‘turbocharged internet’. Hospitals typically produce terabytes of imaging data in a year. As image analysis is computationally expensive (a single image analysis can take hours), the Grid project enabled institutions to connect their super-computers together in order to harness their processing power to create a dynamic brain atlas. It allowed a doctor to compare a patient’s brain scan to that of a dynamically created brain atlas showing the normal range of size and shape of brain structures for a person of the same age, gender, and past medical history as the current patient.

At the time, the technology received significant press coverage and this encouraged a follow-up project called IXI, short for Information eXtraction from Imaging. The idea was to use Grid technology to do automated image analysis for drug development, including image registration and segmentation. The objective of IXI was to assess the scalability of the Dynamic Brain Atlas, extend data outside the brain and build an application interface. One application was the automatic delineation of bones. Manual delineation is extremely time consuming and expensive. IXI was able to rapidly identify the structures of inte

rest and extract useful information.

As pharmaceutical companies are keen on controlling the spiralling drug development costs and accelerate time to market, the business idea was to form IXICO and offer image analysis with the in-house developed algorithms and experience amassed from the Grid project.

Today, IXICO is a full-service Imaging CRO that provides comprehensive, technology-based solutions for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries across all therapeutic areas and clinical trials phases. IXICO works within an ISO9001:2000 certified Quality Management System, with the provenance of the data analysis results stored to provide a complete electronic audit trail.