The MICCAI conference 2009

Earlier this week, IXICO was exhibiting at the MICCAI conference in London. This is an international conference to do with the analysis of medical images – with lots of really mathematical stuff presented by computer scientists and engineers. MICCAI stands for Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions, so as well as analysis of images, it also has presentations on robotics. The people presenting at the MICCAI meeting are trying to invent new ways of using images to diagnose disease, plan treatment, monitor treatment progress or even control robotic surgery. If you get your work accepted at MICCAI you are doing very well, as less than 10% of work submitted is accepted for a talk.

MICCAI this year was in London, and two of IXICO’s founders – Dave Hawkes and Daniel Rueckert – were involved in organizing it. One of IXICO’s software developers – Sergiy Milko– was also presenting his work.

The people coming to MICCAI all use medical images in their research, and so all have to deal with the problem of moving around these images, collecting them from scanners, ensuring patient privacy rules are obeyed, and sharing the images with colleagues. All too often, the medical images used in this sort of research are not very well looked after – and get lost or mis-placed. If you don’t know what sort of patient the images are collected from, then they become useless for almost all types of research.

That is one reason we decided that MICCAI would be a good place to show everyone Trial Wire - http://www.mytrialwire.com/ – our free tool to share, de-identify and organize your DICOM medical images, and also show people Trial Tracker – our latest product that provides a web-based image management system for comprehensive management of all imaging data from acquisition to analysis. You can get more information on Trial Tracker here www.ixico.com/newproducts/trialtracker

And I nearly forgot – a real highlight of MICCAI was the conference dinner. It was held in the Science Museum. London’s science museum contains fascinating material, from old steam engines to Apollo lander to CT scanners. On the computing side, it contains really ancient computer gizmos - Baggage’s mechanical computer from 150 years go, or the computer memory developed 50 years ago for the Manchester computer). You couldn’t do much image analysis on those systems: modern scanners can generate 1Gbyte of data per patient!

So it was among all these fascinating exhibits that the MICCAI banquet was held – with stilt walkers, jugglers, and a disco. Quite an event!
To find out more about MICCAI go to http://www.miccai.org/

A blog about the blogger

I first started to look for an intern to help out as part of the IXICO marketing team. To be perfectly honest, we were not hoping for too much: just someone who would benefit from the experience of working at a fast-paced company like IXICO. When I was introduced to Anthony Chao (the creator of the IXICO blog) through the Shell Step placement program I quickly realised that we were in for a bit of an experience ourselves.

Over the course of the eight weeks Anthony spent with us, he successfully managed to plan and execute the technology social media marketing strategy and increased traffic to our web site by more than 30%. In addition to a host of other successful projects, Anthony also started the IXICO blog as a way to develop IXICO's image in the industry as a thought leader and to generally increase IXICO’s presence on the web.

Due largely to its informative yet informal tone, the IXICO blog has been well received internally and externally. Going forward, our aim is to rotate the authorship of the blog to allow real company participation on a variety of topics, based on the different areas of expertise within our group. The blog will be a platform from which IXICO employees can voice their opinions on or insights into relevant areas of discussion. I am extremely excited about the possibilities and we are indebted to Anthony for his efforts in getting this off the ground.

The Shell Step scheme is a UK-based organisation that links together small- to medium-sized businesses and undergraduates. The recruitment process was easy, and the people at Shell Step were available throughout the internship to monitor progress.

In recognition for his achievements, Anthony won the Shell Step Regional Award for most enterprising student. He now will be representing his region and competing for the award for most enterprising student of South UK. The award ceremony will be held on the 22nd September in London. Good luck, Anthony!

Would we recommend having an intern? Absolutely! Not only is it great to see fresh new talent but it is good to give something back. We will definitely be considering the shell Step program next year. To find out more about the Shell Step program visit www.shellstep.org.uk

Kranti Parekh

Marketing Manager - IXICO. Ltd

HIPAA - The Hippocratic Oath for Techies

As technology proliferated into healthcare, especially in the radiological practice, privacy protection once again entered the limelight as new issues concerning electronic data have been raised. In the medical imaging industry alone, which is a small subset of the healthcare sector, IXICO can testify that vast numbers of medical images exist in electronic format for compact storage, easy maintenance and rapid retrieval.

However, the convenience of data access across networks extending far beyond clinical sites or hospitals means that the patient’s personal information is potentially at risk of becoming publicly available. For example, every level of image transfer presents a potential security threat: (i) the images could be accessed by unauthorized parties at the clinical site (confidentiality) (ii) during the image transfer, images could be intercepted and modified (integrity) (iii) the intended receiver of the images might not receive them (authentication).

To meet the demands of rapidly developing technology, the US instituted in 2003 the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in order to set and enforce the standards for protecting the privacy and security of healthcare data. Indeed, privacy protection in the healthcare sector has always been an important issue. One part of the Hippocratic Oath, penned more than two millennia ago, stated that ‘Whatever I see or hear, professionally or privately, which ought not to be divulged, I will keep secret and tell no one’. HIPAA can be seen as the equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath for anyone dealing with electronic medical data. Non-compliance with HIPAA regulations can have severe consequences, including heavy fines and potential prison time.

Patient privacy is clearly an area of increasing focus for both the healthcare and technology industries. The difficulty for medical practitioners and clinical trial sponsors alike is that compliance with the regulations is difficult to maintain; the regulations are often not clear in their application to new and emerging technologies and individuals are often faced with rather laborious routes to compliance. The goal is to simplify the process as much as possible through automation. Many medical technology companies, including IXICO, are developing tools to help comply with HIPAA regulations through computer-based automation. Promising technologies include data encryption, virtual private networks, data embedding, and audit trails. These tools will undoubtedly improve personal data security and may potentially provide the basis for updating the laws governing the practice of medicine in the modern medical arena.