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Visage PACS intelligently serves the images to any remote Mac client

Lake Imaging, which serves referring physicians at 17 locations around Melbourne and regional Victoria, is one of the largest independent imaging groups in Australia. It operates MRI scanners at two locations, CT scanners at six locations, a PET system, 24 ultrasound machines, and several gamma cameras, and produces about 250,000 examinations a year. The company prides itself on a progressive, proactive approach to technology and was an early adopter of PACS in 2001. It has now become a global reference site for the recently launched Visage 7, the first version of Visage to offer a native Mac client.

“In our Ballarat facility outside Melbourne, many of our specialists use Macintosh computers, and there’s never been good access into a radiology PACS for a Mac,” says radiologist Dr. Alastair Firkin, who is also a director of Lake Imaging. “So when Visage Imaging came up with the suggestion that they could produce a native viewing application for the Macintosh, it was an extremely exciting option for us. We’re seeing more and more acceptance of Mac OS X with physicians, and it only makes sense to use its functionality for diagnostic imaging.”

“It gives us a competitive advantage because we’re not forcing specialists to work in an environment they didn’t choose,” says Lake Imaging CEO John Livingston. “We let them work on an operating system that they’re familiar and comfortable with. A few years ago, I was told that a marketing survey found that 60 percent of Australian specialists who were referring patients for radiology were using the Mac.”

Visage 7: A revolutionary remote DICOM viewer

In an age when cardiac radiology studies can run to more than 6000 images, and image downloads can be tedious even on a fast Internet connection, Visage has taken the groundbreaking step of giving physicians access to images on a server without downloading them. The Visage PACS intelligently serves the images to any remote Mac client.

Visage Imaging software on Mac desktops and laptops gives them the same image quality, the same full toolset, and the same smooth, stable experience that they would get from a radiologist’s high-end workstation. Visage is CE and FDA cleared for local and remote diagnostic viewing and meets all HIPAA compliance requirements. Access typically takes just seconds.

Visage 7 extends all these capabilities to the Mac platform. It processes images from any modality and provides 2D, 3D, and 4D viewing to the user’s specifications. If diagnosis of a cardiac lesion calls for 2D images at a 30 fps frame rate, Visage caches the loop and plays it back at the correct frame rate.

“One advantage of Visage 7 is that it’s a lot faster, which implies quicker response to patients,” says Firkin. “Another is that we can have many people looking at the same image at the same time on different platforms. I could be working in the practice on a Windows-based system and talking to clinicians who are looking at the same pictures on their Mac-based systems either at home or in their offices.”

A full-blown 2D/3D/4D radiological workstation on the MacBook Air

Output from the company’s imaging systems travels over a dedicated broadband microwave link – one of the largest WANs in the southern hemisphere – between the cities of Geelong, Ballarat, and Melbourne. The DICOM images reside on a Visage server at a central location and physicians can access examination results securely over the Internet.

Because all the image processing is done on the Visage server, users don’t need high-end desktop or laptop systems. Physician running native Visage 7 software on a MacBook Air – or any Mac – now have a powerful, full-featured DICOM image viewer in their hands that equals any radiologist’s workstation.

“It’s always been logical to encourage vendors to improve applications so they would run in a Macintosh environment,” says Livingston. “It’s logical that the radiologist’s workstation would ultimately be able to run on a Mac platform at home or at work.”

An enthusiastic welcome from Mac users

The Mac users among Lake Imaging’s radiologists and referring specialists are delighted to have Visage 7’s functionality on their systems. Many of the major US institutions that already use Visage – including the University of Chicago Medical Center, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Boston, and the University of Texas at El Paso – will have the capability of using a Mac for remote viewing.

“We’ve been applauded at many levels since we took the decision to develop a native Mac version of Visage,” says Visage CEO David Chambers. “It’s still creating excitement – a buzz and a positive response – both internally and externally. There was a demand and a need out there among the many clinicians who are Mac users. We’re delighted to be putting these tools in their hands.”

Source: Visage Imaging

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