• 11/30/2005
  • Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  • press release
  • PR Newswire (www. prnewswire.com)

Cedara Software, a Merge Healthcare company (Nasdaq: MRGE; TSX: MRG) and a leading independent developer of medical software technologies for the global healthcare market, today announced its exhibition of a works-in-progress suite of software solutions for oncology diagnosis and treatment analysis at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Oncology is one of the fastest growing areas for medical imaging in healthcare. With a wealth of experience in developing disease centric solutions for healthcare specialists, Cedara will introduce a new clinical product line named Cedara OncologyWorks to the radiology community at RSNA. Applications demonstrated will include functional components designed to assist with therapy planning and response assessment through PET/CT fusion, magnetic resonance (MR) based functional diffusion mapping, tracking quantitative tumour measurements over time, patient follow-up management and more.

Cedara OncologyWorks provides first of kind support for diagnostic and therapeutic assessment for radiologists and radiation oncologists; for PACS vendors, device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and other solution providers, Cedara OncologyWorks provides leading edge capability in oncology care.

Cancer is a major public cost for healthcare in the United States as well as in other developed countries. In 2004 alone, a total of 1,368,030 new cancer cases and 563,700 deaths are predicted to have occurred in the United States alone.

Among the products demonstrated at RSNA, Cedara will be highlighting progress in the development of its multi-modality workstation Cedara I-Response(TM). Cedara I-Response is a works-in-progress software solution that features an exclusive technology for molecular imaging known as Functional Diffusion Mapping(TM) (fDM(TM)) for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Based on landmark work at the University of Michigan, the application was designed for therapy response assessment. Differing from standard techniques that use anatomical images to evaluate tumour growth, functional diffusion mapping is an imaging technique that can visualize changes in tumour tissue resulting from cellular mechanisms; because of this, it has the potential to precisely monitor at an earlier point the impact of cancer therapies and provide valuable diagnostic information. By giving radiologists, oncologists, researchers and others a sophisticated tool to study tumour activity at both the cellular and anatomical level, it is hoped that this technology may provide the foundation on which fast, efficient and personalized cancer treatment can develop.

Initial clinical work showed tremendous promise for fDM in the area of brain cancer care, and the assessment of brain tumour response to therapy. Researchers are now beginning to investigate new clinical domains, such as head and neck cancer and breast cancer.

Recent journal articles highlighting the potential clinical impact of this technology include, Moffat, Bradford A., et al., “Functional diffusion map: A noninvasive MRI biomarker for early stratification of clinical brain tumor response”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), April 2005 and Hamstra, Daniel A., et al., “Evaluation of the functional diffusion map as an early biomarker of time-to-progression and overall survival in high-grade glioma”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), November 2005.

“I-Response provides a strong platform on which radiologists and radiation oncologists can work together in a united effort to fight cancer,” said Harald Zachmann, Oncology Market Manager at Cedara Software. “With a component based architecture, all of the applications in OncologyWorks can be easily integrated into existing OEM products; a number of our OEM partners have expressed keen interest in this technology due to its broad implications to cancer care. As we have seen in a variety of clinical specialties, our technology’s ability to assist healthcare professionals with fast, efficient and accurate diagnostic information is unsurpassed.”

Cedara Software is a Merge Healthcare company focused on the development of custom engineered software applications and development tools for the medical imaging OEM and International markets. Cedara software is deployed in hospitals and clinics worldwide and is licensed by many of the world’s leading medical device and healthcare information technology companies. Cedara technologies and expertise span all the major digital imaging modalities including computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), digital X-ray, mammography, ultrasound, echo-cardiology, angiography, nuclear medicine, positron emission tomography (PET) and fluoroscopy. Cedara medical imaging offerings are used in all aspects of clinical imaging workflow including the capture of a patient’s digital image; the archiving, communication and manipulation of digital images; sophisticated clinical applications to analyze digital images; and the use of imaging in minimally- invasive surgery. For additional information, visit http://www.cedara.com/ .