At this week’s RSNA meeting, Mirada Solutions of Oxford, U.K., is debuting a new computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) workstation that it believes takes CAD to a new level. The workstation is based on the company’s proprietary standard mammogram form (SMF) software, which Mirada believes can do a better job at differentiating between malignant and benign tissue than current systems on the market.
Mirada’s SMF software enables the direct comparison of data sets captured by MRI, CT, and PET. To eliminate variation in mammograms, which is seen even when the same operator uses the same machine, SMF uses algorithms to extract quantitative diagnostic parameters from data sets compiled by 3-D scanning. The resulting images give physicians an objective review of the images’ contents.
"We build imaging-processing algorithms specific to the data to which they’re being applied," said Dr. Ralph Highnam, the company’s CEO. "For the breast, we built algorithms based on the physics of the x-ray process. That has led Mike [Brady, one of the primary developers of Mirada Solutions’ image registration and fusion products and Mirada’s chairman] to come up with what we now term ‘standard mammogram form’ -- SMF."
Highnam said that Mirada’s SMF software enables users to standardize the signal going into a CAD system to enable it to work optimally without manual tuning. This supports the quantification of mammography images, which can help clinicians accurately measure things like patient response to therapy.
Mirada Solutions currently has 20 employees and is closely tied to Oxford University. Mirada stands as the result of a merger between two U.K.-based companies, Oxiva and Omia, both of which were spun off from the university’s Medical Vision Laboratory, a research center connected to the school.
The university maintains a stake in Mirada, although the company remains independent and privately held, and Mike Brady and other Mirada principals are professors at Oxford. Importantly, Mirada Solutions holds a first-right-of-refusal agreement for university-developed technologies.
Mirada’s SMF-based CAD workstation has not yet begun the regulatory approval process, with clinical trials planned for mid-2002. Max Wilson, Mirada’s vice president of operations, said that the company feels confident that it will acquire approval quickly. Until then, Mirada is considering licensing its SMF technology to other CAD workstation manufacturers, Highnam said.
Although licensing the software will enable image standardization among other CAD systems, Mirada believes that its own product will still be unique. Mirada’s CAD system will build upon SMF technology to distinguish between malignant and benign pathology, according to Wilson. "We can get to the stage where we point to the area of particular interest, helping the radiologist more than can be done at the moment," he said.
Highnam emphasized that Mirada’s CAD workstation, which functions with digitized mammograms and full-field digital mammography (FFDM) systems, is a computer-aided diagnosis tool -- not, like other manufacturers’ workstations, simply a "detection" tool. Other CAD workstations are not as deeply based upon the formation of the image, Wilson said.
"Thus, we can license our SMF-generation software to computer-aided detection companies and still sell our workstations." Also, Highnam said, "Early tests indicate that [Mirada’s workstation] will be able to increase the true-positive rate slightly [and] it will reduce the false-positives substantially in [microcalcifications]."
By Leslie Farnsworth
AuntMinnie.com contributing writer
November 25, 2001
Copyright © 2001 AuntMinnie.com
