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Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | December 10, 2009
ContextVision, a 26-year-old company headquartered in Linkoping, Sweden, hopes to limit that harm with its latest image enhancement products.
ContextVision's applications are unbranded and sold directly to OEMs, so they have a policy of not revealing who packages them with their equipment. "We're 'Intel inside,'" said Barry. But ContextVision does claim to now work with about 40 equipment makers.
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They call the proprietary algorithm their product depends on GOP, a set of adaptive filters that remove noise and format the image in the way the OEM wants. "It's a way of looking at contextual structures," explained Barry, and ContextVision claims it mimics the way humans pull visual information from their environment. In the latest version, captured images are compared against around 95 data libraries to help reconstruct a low-dose image so that it's diagnostically equal to a normal-dose image.
Barry said their technology draws on advances made in graphics processing units partly spurred by, of all things, the video game industry. "We're riding the GPU power curve and cost curve," he said.
At this year's RSNA, their big debut was the GOPView XR-2 Plus for digital X-ray machines. Barry said while they don't have clinical results in yet, he expects the dose reduction to come in at the 40 to 50 percent range.
But ContextVision was able to share results from some pre-clinical tests. On Friday, researchers presented data from a trial using their image-enhancement filter on angiographies performed on pigs. ContextVision claimed that the filtered low-radiation dose angiograms had comparable quality to normal-dose images, while cutting radiation dosage during interventions by half.
Latest iterations
One of the biggest low-dose trends at the show was "iterative reconstruction," offered by both Siemens and GE.
IR is a set of nearly noise-impervious algorithms that helps computers reconstruct 2-D or 3-D images. Historically, their use in med tech has been low, because of their slow speed. But Siemens and GE seem to have overcome any earlier limitations.
IRIS, Iterative Reconstruction in Image Space, Siemens' version, achieves a claimed dose savings of up to 60 percent. GE's ASIR, Adaptive Statistical Iterative Reconstruction, packaged with their LightSpeed VCT XTe and their Discovery CT750 HD, gives a claimed dose reduction of 40-50 percent.
But IR isn't all these two companies had to offer. GE says their SnapShot pulse technology can help cut cardiac CT doses up to 83 percent. And Siemens says advances in scanning speed for its SOMATOM Definition Flash Dual Source CT scanner mean it can do a complete scan of the chest in 0.6 seconds.
