August 3, 2011 — Siemens Healthcare announced that its syngo.via advanced visualization software will be exclusively used by researchers from the National Center for Image Guided Therapy (NCIGT) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston.
Supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NCIGT is a research group dedicated to advancing image guided interventional techniques with some of the newest diagnostic imaging tools from Siemens Healthcare coupled with interventional surgical systems.
Co-directed by two radiologists, Ferenc A. Jolesz, M.D., and Clare M. Tempany, M.D., the NCIGT’s physicians and researchers are committed to making strides in less invasive, more patient-centric procedural medicine. To help them achieve these goals, they have turned to a combination of Siemens diagnostic imaging modalities and imaging IT.
They plan to install Siemens’ syngo.via across all radiology workstations to provide advanced visualization functionality. Physicians also plan to develop new image guided therapeutic approaches and to improve a number of already validated interventional procedures, including image guided therapy in open brain surgery; radiation treatment of prostate cancer and gynecological tumors; breast conserving therapy; magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-guided cryoablation; treatment of atrial and ventricular fibrillation; and brain tumor laser ablation.
"The NCIGT research and clinical teams work in a complex multi-modality environment where the imaging modalities are integrated and there is a sophisticated interplay between them as part of a workflow defined by the clinical application,” said Jolesz, director of the magnetic resonance imaging division and director of the NCIGT. “syngo.via will be enable us to handle not only the individual imaging modalities and display the large volume of images but also to integrate them into a single, very efficient workflow process."
As they refine their techniques in clinical suites that provide access to highly integrated advanced imaging modalities, radiologists with the NCIGT are turning to syngo.via to automatically prepare images and enable timely navigation through cases – in line with disease-specific requirements, and to quickly access information anywhere, from almost any modality, and share it with colleagues and clinical partners. Brigham and Women’s Hospital is the 500th site globally to install this system for advanced visualization.
In the mid-1990s, BWH had emerged as a leader in image guided therapy with MRI technology. In 2005, the NIH awarded a grant that named Jolesz and his team to the NCIGT, enabling the group to serve as a national resource for translational research.
The NIH funding also enabled NCIGT researchers to expand the scope of their work to include other advanced imaging modalities, including positron emission tomography (PET), computed tomography (CT) and X-ray angiography.
At BWH, all of these imaging tools will be delivering studies to radiologists using syngo.via to streamline the image interpretation process with a single click to advanced application packages that can be immediately launched when studies are opened in the same viewer and on the same workstation.
For more information: www.siemens.com/healthcare
July 25, 2024 
