With Philips? IntelliSpace Portal, clinicians can view nuclear medicine images on iPads, iPhones, or any other laptop or tablet device.
Royal Philips Electronics is in a position to change the way we process and view SPECT and PET/CT images with IntelliSpace Portal’s host of nuclear medicine applications, which were showcased at this year’s Society of Nuclear Medicine (SNM) Annual Meeting in Miami in June. IntelliSpace Portal will be able to offer Philips’ complete portfolio of applications on its server with the same processing and review capabilities that have usually required a dedicated workstation.
Traditionally, SPECT and PET/CT cameras or scanners are directly attached to specific workstations where the data are sent, processed, and viewed. Technologists and physicians have been tied to the workstation from capture, through processing, viewing, and diagnosis. Specific workstations for each of these cameras or scanners correlate to a greater footprint in the physical space they occupy and in the cost and maintenance of the equipment. The requirement for physicians to view the data at the individual workstations also can affect the timeliness and quality of patient care.
By integrating nuclear medicine (SPECT and PET) and CT processing and viewing on a common platform with their Extended Brilliance Workspace (EBW), Philips had already moved toward a comprehensive and scalable workflow solution on one workspace. Now with the IntelliSpace Portal solution, the company has brought NM processing and viewing to the next level. “As facilities have fewer and fewer resources from a funding and budgeting perspective, they want to mitigate their cost and overhead. Many facilities are also very restricted on space, and as these workstations add up, they take up a lot of space. This is a very good opportunity for Philips to reduce our customers’ footprint and reduce overall costs of ownership,” said Ketan Shah, senior marketing leader for Nuclear Medicine and Clinical Informatics Solutions, Philips Healthcare.
IntelliSpace Portal is designed as an Internet-based server that not only will provide the processing and viewing capabilities, but also will push images and data to any thin client that has viewing capability. This frees doctors from their hard tie to the PET/CT or SPECT scanner. “They will be able to view images on iPads, iPhones, or any other laptop or tablet device and collaborate via the Internet through cloud computing. All the data are stored on one server, and it also distributes that data into the PACS [picture archiving and communication system] and long-term archiving accordingly,” said Shah. The IntelliSpace Portal can interface with a Philips or non-Philips PACS.
IntelliSpace Portal is built on a scalable server-client platform, offering the flexibility to efficiently add concurrent users. “We have configurations that allow up to 5, 10, or 15 concurrent users. We even offer a configuration for individual users, if you will, so all your user’s applications will reside on the server where the data are processed and the information will be pushed from the server to the clients themselves,” said Shah.
The currently available version of IntelliSpace Portal is primarily focused on CT with some of the nuclear medicine features, such as Multimodality Tumor Tracking. This upcoming version of IntelliSpace Portal will have all of the applications and processing ability of the latest version of Philips Extended Brilliance Workspace (version 2.0). The NM applications portfolio for this newer version of IntelliSpace Portal will allow nuclear medicine technologists and physicians to process, review, analyze, and share images and findings from SPECT, SPECT/CT, PET/CT, and PET/MR studies using applications such as NM Review, NM Processing Application Suite, Astonish Reconstruction, Multimodality Tumor Tracking, Prefetch, and Collaboration Viewer.
“The IntelliSpace Portal nuclear medicine features have drastically changed the way we treat patients,” said Janusz Kikut, MD, director of nuclear medicine and PET/CT, Fletcher Allen Health Care, Burlington, Vt. “The features now allow us to better monitor change in disease status using the nuclear medicine imaging modalities that are often important to diagnosis. And, since we can access IntelliSpace Portal away from our campus, we’ve been able to improve our workflow with radiologists and seamlessly communicate the nuclear medicine results to referring physicians.”
“This is a true cloud computing thin client solution, and it spans across radiology, nuclear medicine, CT, and MR. We are not only an imaging company. Philips offers a full solution from capturing the image from the scanner to distributing that image without losing any data,” said Shah.
