"Philips is now really a health and wellbeing company," Van Houten said.
The company has ambitious plans for its health care section. By 2015, it intends for half a billion people to have used or benefited from a Philips medical product, such as getting a scan on a Philips imaging unit or having vital signs read on a Philips monitor.
But one area of special focus is cancer, according to Van Houten. "We don't think we can cure cancer," he said, "but we believe we can make therapy delivery so much more precise to reduce side effects."
During DOTmed's tour, Philips showed the news team two experimental products in the precision-therapy for cancer category, in addition to two clinical decision support prototype programs.
Planning liver cancer treatments
One potentially precision-improving technique shown to DOTmed News is a software program that could tweak the accuracy of a kind of minimally invasive liver cancer treatment that uses heat-generating needles.
Sandeep Dalal (left) and
Jochen Kruecker demonstrate liver
tumor treatment planning tech.
In this technique, a doctor guides a needle into a liver tumor, aided visually by ultrasound and CT scans. When the needle sticks into the tumor, the doctor presses a button, opening the needle's endpoint into a fan of thin tines. These in turn emit high-intensity radiowaves that heat up and burn away cancerous tissue, potentially destroying the tumor.
While the treatment works well on smaller tumors, it's trickier for lesions larger than 4 centimeters, according to Jochen Kruecker, project leader with interventional oncology guidance at Philips Research. For bigger growths, doctors have to perform multiple insertions, and therefore burns, to destroy all the malignant tissue.
"It's very difficult to do just by mentally considering where you have to go and track where you are (in the liver)," he said.
To better plan treatments, Kruecker said his team's program automatically creates optimal positions where doctors should place different insertions in order to cover the entire tumor. The plans are self-correcting, too: if a doctor misses the target, represented by a crosshair on the real-time ultrasound of the area, the software adapts the plan, to ensure that after all the burns the entire tumor is zapped.
