Dear AuntMinnie Member,
In a model of public-private partnership, a group of medical imaging companies is funding a major effort to expand a database of computer-aided detection (CAD) lung cases maintained by the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
The companies aren't just doing it to be altruistic. They're hoping that the contribution could translate into faster development of CAD software that's better at detecting suspicious areas on lung scans, according to an article by contributing writer Cynthia Keen that we're featuring in our Advanced Visualization Digital Community this week.
The story details how a group of eight multimodality and software vendors contributed $1.2 million as part of the Imaging Database Resources Initiative (IDRI). The project plans to add hundreds of new cases to the Lung Image Database Consortium, which is creating a database of lung cases in which the CAD results have been verified as "ground truth" based on clinical outcomes.
CAD cases where ground-truth results are available are crucial as they enable software developers to test the efficacy of their algorithms against cases in which the clinical results are already known. And the ability to tap into a single, standard database of cases means each vendor won't have to spend time acquiring cases themselves, and will be able to focus on software development -- meaning radiologists should get access to better CAD software more quickly.
Learn more about this intriguing project by clicking here.
In another article on CAD we're featuring in the Advanced Visualization Digital Community, U.K. researchers pitted a virtual colonoscopy CAD program against expert readers, and found that the CAD software turned in higher marks for medium and large polyps (although it also produced more false positives). Read about that story by clicking here, or go to av.auntminnie.com.
