Software Gives 3-D Images Inside Body
With the ease of a youngster playing a video game, Dr. Sean Casey brings up on his computer screen a three-dimensional image of the arteries at the base of a patient’s skull.
It takes about three minutes to surf through the circle of arteries, manipulating the image to view the surface and inside of the vessels from different angles as he searches for an aneurysm, a bulge in a weakened artery wall that could burst, causing a stroke.
The ability to magnify the picture makes Casey’s job a lot easier. A radiologist, he uses the sophisticated Vitrea software at Fairview-University Medical Center to quickly read and evaluate three-dimensional information transmitted from computed tomography and magnetic resonance scanners.
Fairview-University, affiliated with the University of Minnesota Medical School, is one of 10 medical facilities that worked with Vital Images Inc. in testing the Vitrea software now being used in about 80 clinics and hospitals around the country.
Casey says the software allows him to do work in two to three minutes that used to take hours.
The software stacks images from the scanner and makes a 3-D model, which enables a technician or physician to peel back successive layers of an image to look deeper into the body. The technology also can be used to take a visual trip through the trachea, esophagus or colon or get a 3-D image of a shattered bone before surgery.
In the future, doctors suggested, Vitrea may eliminate the need by many patients for more expensive, invasive, and risky diagnostic procedures.
‘Leaves Nothing to the Imagination’
Before 3-D imaging capabilities, clinicians looked at a series of two-dimensional images to imagine how the internal organs or a broken bone looked.
“Because the technology is so new, we’re at a stage where we’re still doing both. I think it will take a few years before the surgeon is comfortable with using just this,” Casey said.
Already, Casey said, using Vitrea has decreased by about half the number of catheter angiograms done at Fairview-University.
“The goal of this technology generally is to make an impact on a large number of patients. If somebody has an aneurysm in their brain, [it means] being able to go to your local hospital and have confidence they’ll be able to perform the procedure at one-fifth the cost and more safely,” said Vincent Argiro, who founded Vital Images in 1988.
The company began concentrating on the medical imaging market in late 1995 after receiving government clearance for its earlier VoxelView software as a medical device. Earlier, Vital Images also had created 3-D visualization software used in oil and gas exploration, seismic interpretation and reservoir modeling and management.
Mark Kach, clinic administrator of Diagnostic Radiology Associates of Wisconsin, sees a good future for the Vitrea software. His small clinic in Rice Lake, Wis., has used it for about 250 patients in the last year.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg of its capabilities,” Kach said.
“When it’s a surgical case, [the surgeons] have a much, much clearer picture of what they’re going to be faced with. It leaves nothing to the imagination,” Kach said.
“The impact has been profound,” said Dr. Pablo Villablanca, assistant professor of radiology at UCLA Medical Center, which expects to have five Vitrea workstations in use by the end of the year.
By reducing the need for some invasive procedures, the medical center has cut patient morbidity, study time and diagnostic costs and improved treatment planning, Villablanca said.
Faster, Cheaper Than Competitors
Manufacturers of some of the larger CT and MR scanners also make 3-D imaging workstations, but the doctors said those systems tend to be more expensive than the Vitrea system, which costs about $70,000. They also are slower and harder to use, they said.
“None of these products comes anywhere near the quality that Vitrea and Vital Images has. It’s really a superior product. I think we have taken 3-D imaging to a whole new dimension,” Villablanca said.
Gordon Harris, head of the computer-aided diagnostic center at Massachusetts General Hospital, had four Vitrea workstations installed in early January after using a demonstration system for several months.
“It was a significant investment,” Harris said. “We researched what we thought would be the best use of our resources, and this is the decision that we made based on what we found available. It’s fast. It’s easy to use. It has very high-quality renderings.”
Vital Images’ Argiro said sales are meeting expectations and the company’s goal is to move into the black this year. Shares of the Minneapolis-based company are lightly traded on an over-the-counter bulletin board. Argiro hopes to have the company listed on Nasdaq later this year.
“An indication of what we can accomplish is that we have cracked into a layer of hospitals which have never used technology like this before. Now more than 50% of our sales are coming from small hospitals and private radiology clinics. We believe the ultimate market is very large,” Argiro said.
