Case Study: Nuclear Medicine Workstation
Merge OEM develops a next generation nuclear medicine workstation
Workstation software is result of intensive five-year custom engineering project
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When a medical imaging manufacturer determined in 1993 that it needed a brand new workstation solution for nuclear medicine, it asked Merge OEM – the industry leader in sophisticated visualization toolkits – to lead the project. By choosing Merge, they could enter the market with a new solution much faster than if it were to develop the workstation from scratch.
A group of engineers from this OEM worked with Merge forming a distributed development team. The joint team employed Merge OEM Engineering Methodology, with adaptations for the OEM's internal processes. Key innovations in the workstation include a graphical user interface design that permits multiple time-sharing clinical applications, enabling users to engage in several imaging, image visualization and post-processing tasks simultaneously. It also included a wealth of interactive tools, Microsoft® Visual Basic® programmability, connectivity tools and doctor's worklist, the latter predating the DICOM worklist by several years.
The overall design enables users to choose from the most basic functionality, or perform any of more than 100 advanced applications in oncology, cardiology, neurology, nephrology, bone and others with proven tools for each type of procedure, such as filtered back-projection tomographic reconstruction. To date, there are hundreds of official and user provided applications.
After deployed the first three versions of the software, ongoing development transitioned to the OEM's engineering centers in 1998. From 1998 to present, Merge has continued in a support and maintenance role.
The workstation has been highly successful in the market – propelling it to market share leader with thousands of end-users worldwide.
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