Imaging Tools Designed for Liver Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment Management

New imaging software addresses the challenges of multidisciplinary quantitative imaging evaluation and management, which frequently require the sharing of result in a real-time interactive manner, simultaneously and collaboratively from departments in different locations.

Edda Technology (Princeton, NJ, USA) introduced its innovative IQQA-Liver Suite, which provides dedicated solutions for liver cancer diagnosis and operative treatment management, at the 96th scientific assembly and annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), held November 28-December 3, 2010, in Chicago (IL, USA). For better healthcare and patient management, the IQQA-Liver Suite aims to enhance efficiency and precision in liver disease diagnosis, preoperative treatment planning, intraoperative guidance, postsurgical assessment, and follow-up.

The IQQA-Liver Suite utilizes Edda's proprietary information technology (IT) technology to streamline system platform architectural and workflow design. It not only offers immediate integration with hospitals' existing picture archiving and communication system (PACS), but also allows access to the four-dimensional (4D) IQQA-Liver application for volumetric quantitative assessment and virtual operative simulations from anywhere anytime via the IQQA On Demand Internet platform. Furthermore, a virtual session may be created to allow simultaneous accesses to and manipulations of the same dataset, where conferencing/collaboration from multiple department/locations becomes easy to manage.

At the center of the suite, IQQA-Liver, an advanced 4D image quantitative evaluation system, is currently used by radiologists and surgeons worldwide in liver surgery, transplantation, and interventional centers. The number of clinical image cases evaluated for pre- and post-operative assessment using IQQA-Liver in hospitals has exceeded 1,000 examinations, since the first commercial system installation in Q2 2009. This innovative toolset assists physicians to perform fast real-time interactive assessment and volumetric quantification of liver, liver lobes, hepatics lesions, and vessels from liver imaging data, as well as virtual simulation of resection, lobular/vascular manipulation and quantification to achieve desired treatment planning. In many instances, the use of quantitative IQQA-Liver helps to facilitate the planning of precision treatment procedures on very challenging cases.

Using an individualized 3D E-Liver map generated by IQQA-Liver, IQQA-Guide (works-in-progress) of this suite further provides a real-time quantitative 3D navigation guide to assist physicians during interventional and surgical procedures. The system also provides quantitative risk analysis as well as territory/vascular analysis with quantified volumetry on targeted regions of interest during the guidance process. The intraoperative IQQA-Guide organically links the presurgical planning and post surgical assessment together to help physicians optimize the liver tumor management process.

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