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Healthcare United Kingdom

Helping to develop medical imaging software used in hospitals, universities and laboratories worldwide

Executive Summary

Challenge: The client’s projects required detailed understanding of math, physics, engineering, and coding for speed and reliability—skills our experts provided.

Approach: We have worked on advanced systems for medical imaging and analysis. Our engineers have been trained to work within the highest quality standards.

Result: The software is used globally in hospitals, universities, and laboratories with the aim of supporting cancer and other disease diagnosis in clinical practice for better patient treatment

Services we used:

Table of Contents

About the client

Feedback Medical is a specialist technology company providing innovative software and systems to benefit those working in the field of medical imaging

Their products advance the work of radiologists, clinicians and medical researchers by improving workflows and giving unique insights into diseases, such as cancer.

Feedback Medical’s products originate from developments by professionals working in real-life medical environments and have been advanced in close collaboration with researchers, radiologists and healthcare IT specialists to ensure user confidence and relevance in today’s medical world.

Scope of work

In collaboration with Feedback Medical, we have worked on advanced systems for fluoroscopy, angiography and the statistical analysis of medical images.

Projects developed with Feedback Medical are a good example of how research findings (also conducted at Future Processing) can be applied in the industry.

2006

the year Future Processing started the partnership with Feedback Medical

50

prestigious institutions worldwide use TexRAD

We chose to work with Future Processing, as the projects that we work on are not straightforward programming projects. They generally require a detailed understanding of Maths, Physics and Engineering in addition to the skill and knowledge required to implement code that is both fast and robust. The real-time processing and storage of medical images is often a time-critical operation, and all processes have to be designed in a way that minimises risk – ultimately to the patient.

Dr. Stephen Brown
Chief Regulatory and Compliance Officer, Feedback Medical

Our role

Future Processing helped to develop medical imaging software used in hospitals, universities and laboratories worldwide.

  • FluoroPro

We helped to create software for a digital Fluoroscopy acquisition system called FluoroPro.

The manufacturer of this combined hardware and software product was Virtual Imaging Inc. (later a subsidiary of Canon US), and the system successfully obtained FDA 510k clearance for use as a medical device in 2007.

  • TexRAD

Medical images are used to make decisions on patient care and treatment but are limited to what the human eye can see. TexRAD can be used to extract features (not perceptible by the naked eye) from images acquired in routine clinical practice.

The extra information provided by TexRAD has the potential to assist clinicians to make more informed decisions, for example by predicting the prognosis and enabling the stratification of patients with cancer so they receive the most appropriate treatment.

  • Image Sharing Platform

Our engineers assisted in creating an image sharing platform, used for teaching and collaboration between clinicians. This Cloud-based platform allows real-time synchronisation of medical image display for multiple users in separate locations.

It enables specialists and centres to share clinical cases with selected users with the ultimate goal of improving the diagnosis and management of patients with CTEPH and to upload, share and discuss images including CT scans, V/Q scintigrams, pulmonary angiograms, and MRI scans.

The Image Sharing platform was adopted by the International CTEPH Association (ICA) in July 2015. ICA is an organisation of physicians, surgeons, and other medically qualified professionals committed to advancing the diagnosis and treatment of Chronic Thrombo Embolic Pulmonary Hypertension (CTEPH).

We have a very close relationship with Future Processing. Some of the key programmers actually also have academic experience and help us with our algorithm development. So really it’s an extension of our team, more than just contracting our software development, sending out an idea and getting the code back.

Mike Hayball
Chief Technical Officer, Feedback Medical

Innovation & Research

We’ve gained experience in the analysis of medical images, as well as in working with complex and innovative research projects, where there is a strong connection between science and business.

Feedback Medical has asked us to assist in performing research-based tasks, such as image analysis to extract important discriminative features, statistical analysis and more advanced machine learning techniques to guide algorithmic design.

Research at Future Processing has proven vital. Our engineers publish scientific papers and present them on conferences & symposiums worldwide, among others, in Canada, Australia, USA, Spain, Mexico, Chile and China.

Compliance with standards

The projects that we work on for Feedback Medical have to be conducted with great care, as the intended use of the end products will be as Medical Devices. Our engineers have been trained to work within the constraints of CCI’s EN ISO 13485:2012-compliant quality system.

Main benefits of our partnership

TexRAD has already proven its value in medical research and it is being applied in a wide range of studies which are then published in scientific journals. As a research version, it has been sold to universities and research institutes around the world.

It is hoped that in the future TexRAD can be used to provide more information from clinical trials and help researchers understand the effects of new drugs.

(…) Future Processing provided us with some continuity – the background knowledge required to work with Feedback Medical’s code libraries is not insignificant, and so our relationship with specific key individuals has been essential. Feedback Medical has been able to extend the reach of our quality system to include those key individuals, allowing Future Processing to play a crucial role in the development of Medical Device regulated products for sale both in the US and EU.

Dr. Stephen Brown
Chief Regulatory and Compliance Officer, Feedback Medical

Watch the interview

Mike Hayball explains how nearshoring became the chosen alternative and what benefits working with Future Processing brings to the company.

Play Video

Technologies used in the project

Looking to the future

The ultimate goal for TexRAD is for it to be used in clinical practice, to support the diagnosis of cancer and other diseases, to enable patients to receive the most appropriate treatment.

Feedback Medical aims to extend their imaging platform to increase its applicability to an increasing number of medical image-related problems, and their ultimate solution in robust well-designed products.