The Fontana Women's Hospital in the Swiss town of Chur installed a Digital Mammography CAD System from Carestream Health in June 2007, since when it has successfully been in full clinical operation.

"My experience up until now shows that the Carestream CAD System is a significant step forward in the diagnosis of breast cancer," said Dr Gerold Reutter, leading physician in Radiology, Fontana Women's Hospital, Chur. "The digital mammograms clearly outclass traditional images in terms of detail resolution, making our findings at the Fontana Women's Hospital more reliable. Furthermore, it is a well developed system and through regular updates it keeps pace with changes and remains state of the art technology in computer based diagnostics."

Images are captured using a KODAK DIRECTVIEW CR 975 System and displayed on a high-resolution mammography workstation. The CAD System highlights suspicious areas on the monitors with triangular and star shaped markers. "With these tags, the CAD system shows me points of potential interest," comments Dr Reutter. "The triangles clearly indicate the micro calcifications; the star shaped marks indicate denser soft tissue relative to the surrounding tissue structure. We know that there is a high correlation between the preliminary stages of carcinoma and the formation of a micro calcium group of five calcifications/cm2. The CAD System from Carestream Health highlights such a group and this helps us in our diagnosis. The accuracy of findings is very high."

Dr Reutter also finds image quality to be better when compared to conventional mammography with improved contrast, detail and resolution and that by comparison, conventional images have a blurred and dull effect. The once indispensable magnifying lens is also now no longer needed at the workstation with the ability to enlarge part of the image marked by the CAD system.

Digital mammography not only enhances the reliability of diagnosis, it also provides workflow benefits. For example, the highly developed, integrated speech recognition system enables the direct recording of findings and automatic conversion into written text files. All the image data is downloaded and stored for instant recall and can also be printed or sent via e-mail.

Carestream Health, an independent company, has licensed the Kodak brand for use with its own brands - such as CARESTREAM, DIRECTVIEW and DRYVIEW - across its portfolio of leading-edge medical imaging and healthcare IT products.

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