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/

DICOM – The Industry’s Equivalent of a .pdf File

The word DICOM has a certain buzz about it in the medical imaging community. A substantial part of IXICO’s business revolves around DICOM data analysis. However, despite the large amount of information available in DICOM format, we can testify from experience that it still remains hazy to many. Below is a short description that explains how DICOM came about and its relevance to the imaging community.

DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. It was developed in the 1980s and eventually adopted by the medical imaging community to allow for ease of communication and data transfer. DICOM can be thought of as the medical imaging field’s equivalent of a .pdf file or the lingua franca for imaging systems.

The development of a universal industry standard was imperative as digital imaging began to be widely used. Although the 1980s saw the proliferation of magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography, both of which allowed for an unparallel level of image detail, the emphasis is now on easy connectivity and seamless communication between different imaging devices to boost efficiency and workflow.

The imaging devices were initially designed as isolated equipment with their unique printing and archiving methods. Equipment vendors were thus free to use their own propriety formats for storing imaging data. An image from one vendor could not be viewed using another’s viewer. Adding to this, it came to the point that the vendors would alter formats such that images from older devices could not be read by newer ones. Slight changes in image formats made it a nightmare for display workstations as they were forced to accommodate each new format.

DICOM was born out of the need to develop an imaging standard that would simplify data transfer and archiving between the many vendors. The DICOM format is now a universal imaging standard that is compatible with different brands, modalities, and models of imaging devices. A DICOM committee of radiologists, imaging equipment manufacturers, and engineers are tasked with periodically producing technical guidelines regarding transfer between devices, archives, printers and display workstations. Major imaging equipment manufacturers are also encouraged to produce DICOM conformance statements for their equipment.

DICOM is now the industry standard for medical images. It has made things easier for devices to communicate, raised awareness for connectivity amongst consumers, immensely enhanced collaboration between manufacturers to improve their products, and had a dramatic impact on clinical workflows.