Cedara Software Announces Strategic Partnership with Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH)
TORONTO, May 24: 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 a strategic partnership with University Health Network's Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) in clinical image and information management. UHN (Toronto, Ontario) is an academic research hospital that includes PMH, Toronto General Hospital and Toronto Western Hospital. PMH is respected worldwide for its oncology research.
As part of the agreement, Cedara will provide PMH with a variety of clinical applications, software development toolkits, and services to accelerate the hospital's research and development efforts in oncology and radiation therapy. This encompasses distributed information management (based on Cedara aXigate(TM), web-enabled image management (Cedara I-Reach(TM), rapid application development platforms (Cedara OpenEyes(TM)), and toolkits for image segmentation and image registration.
This Cedara technology will help accelerate PMH's development plans for cancer treatment assessment techniques, particularly the extension of small animal research into treatment strategies for use on human patients. One example of this is STTARR, or Spatio-Temporal Targeting and Amplification of Radiation Response. This effort, chaired by Dr. Robert Bristow, Dr. David Jaffray and Dr. Michael Milosevic, is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary radiation therapy research program.
"There is an increasing amount of medical imaging and diagnostic information available to us for cancer assessment. The future of oncology treatment lies in understanding the relationships between a variety of diagnostic information sources, treatment methods and resulting outcomes," said Dr. David Jaffray, PMH's head of radiation physics. "One of our constant challenges is how to efficiently analyze cumulative results from all of these sources acquired over long periods of time. Cedara's technology will allow us to create a digital environment to link diagnostic input through appropriate rules and models to define optimal treatment."
Cedara's information management solution, based on Cedara aXigate(TM), allows healthcare facilities to unite divergent information systems and create a single point of access to view results. Based on sophisticated technology, aXigate(TM) has been used in variety of different applications worldwide, including implementation as an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) in France. Cedara's OpenEyes(TM) development platform, image segmentation and image registration toolkits will allow PMH's research teams to quickly prototype new software applications required for their research process, and analyze patient data in new and innovative ways. Cedara's popular web-based PACS system, Cedara I-Reach(TM), will be used for pre-clinical imaging.
"Princess Margaret Hospital and the STTARR Centre clearly are at the forefront of oncology and radiation therapy research," said Loris Sartor, President of Cedara Software. "We are very pleased to be working with their teams and assisting their research with our technology. All of Cedara's solutions have been carefully designed for interoperability, flexibility, and efficiency. In oncology and other research areas, our solutions provide powerful ways to expedite diagnostic processes."
Cedara Software is a Merge Healthcare company focused on the development of customized software solutions and development tools for the medical imaging OEM market. Cedara's solutions enable OEM companies to accelerate their time-to-market, reduce development costs and access new streams of revenue. Cedara's 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's technologies and engineering services span all the major digital imaging modalities and a wide variety of clinical specialties including radiology, orthopaedics, women's health, oncology, cardiac imaging, clinical trials, imaging for the veterinarian market and more. For additional information, visit our website at http://cedara.com/.
Merge Healthcare is a leading medical imaging software and services company. Our innovative software solutions use leading-edge imaging software technologies that accelerate market delivery for our OEM customers, while our end-user solutions improve our customers' productivity and enhance the quality of patient care they provide. For additional information, visit our website at www.mergehealthcare.com/.
Source: Cedara Software
CONTACT: Beth Frost-Johnson, Senior Vice President, Marketing of Merge Healthcare, +1-414-977-0000, bfrost@mergehealthcare.com, for Cedara Software
Web site: www.mergehealthcare.com/ http://cedara.com/
