Mercury´s Visage

Visage CS cardiac package

Mercury Computer Systems, which describes its products as: ‘3-D to the Core solutions that empower the transformation of the medical imaging workflow, from acquisition, reconstruction, and visualisation, to distribution and management’, will present its full Visage range for OEMs at ECR 2007. The company reports that this presentation aims to demonstrate the level of image quality and performance now needed to cope with the huge data volume generated from multi-slice CT and CT/PET scanners as well as new clinical applications within the diagnostic process.

Acquisition
‘Our next-generation digital MRI receiver has breakthrough noise reduction technology’, Mercury reports. ‘The Visage MR is a high-bandwidth, analogue-to-digital receiver board with four times the resolution of current-generation MRI receivers, coupled with an extremely high sampling rate; thus it allows shorter scan times and higher patient throughput. Visage MR incorporates breakthrough phase stabilisation technology that virtually eliminates phase error-induced noise in MRI images and MRI-specific noise-reducing technology that significantly improves signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) in MRI images compared with existing offerings in the marketplace.’

Reconstruction
Also on show will be the company’s 100X accelerated Spiral CT reconstruction with the Mercury Cell Accelerator Board (CAB), its latest Cell Broadband Engine (BE) processor-based product. ‘The CAB is designed to deliver an unprecedented 180 GFLOPS of performance and an amazing 25 GB/s memory bandwidth in a single PCI Express ATX form factor card for embedded medical OEM applications,’ Mercury points out.

Advances in 3-D and 4-D visualisation
The firm reports that its medical 3-D and 4-D visualisation and analysis includes ‘…blazingly fast study-loading with 2000-slice dataset start times measured in seconds, real-time high definition volume rendering without the drastic down-sampling and contour artifacts common to other implementations. Our state-of-the art volume visualisation solutions deliver breakthrough levels of image quality and accelerated rendering – all on scalable, commercially available standard GPU platforms.’

At ECR 2007, the firm will demonstrate its Visage CS Thin Client/Server, with complete 3-D PACS workflow integration and enhanced 3-D capabilities, including a Cardiac Analysis Option featuring quantitative and visual analysis of cardiac dynamics using 4-D multi-slice CT data to assess functional parameters as well as coronary artery analysis. Additionally, Visage CS will feature improved bone removal and vessel visualisation tools that greatly improve the performance and simplicity of CT angiography workflow.

Mercury also points out that its Visage PACS, a web-based, scalable, enterprise-grade image management system, now features ‘…powerful new functions that enable flexible arrangement of multiple viewers, powerful new options for side-by-side comparison, as well as hanging protocols. Visage PACS is fully integrated with Mercury’s 3-D thin client technology, offering consistent and efficient image and database access through both 2-D web viewers and 3-D thin clients.’

At ECR 2007, Mercury Computer Systems will be in Expo C, booth # 343

08.03.2007

• data management (571)
• imaging (1537)
• MRI (771)