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Rukmini Priyadarshini

THE Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences in Bangalore is using MatrixView's software. The installation was done free of cost for the institute.

Praveen Vemula, technical officer at the institute, spoke to eWorld.

Here's the level of activity at the hospital: Its cardiology and neurology departments — which use the EchoView software — see about 140 cardiac outpatients and 100 neurology/neurosurgery outpatients daily.

Each department has three or four senior consultants, and four or five post-graduate residents. On average, about six cardiac surgeries, five neuro-surgeries and 15 procedures, such as angioplasty and balloon angioplasties, are performed everyday.

According to Vemula, "While CAT scans and MRI images are a series of static images, images of echocardiograms - being video clips - took a lot of storage space, up to 4 GB per scan. Then, there was the lack of flexibility — if a cardiac consultant wanted a specific view that had not been taken, the patient would have to come back for another Echo."

Such things happen since a cardiac consultant cannot always be around to provide guidance to the scan technician for all the echo scans he wants done on his patients.Vemula says MatrixView installed EchoView for its two echocardiogram machines and since then, the hospital has been able to manage doctors' time better.

Even as an OP (outpatient) patient is undergoing a scan, the images are compressed — up to 30 times, without data loss — and can be stored on a central server. A consultant can take a look at the images, in the time he gets between cases, to update the technician or resident — on the type of image or the manipulation he wants. So, sick patients do not need to wait or come back later.

Not only that, busy senior doctors can save their time to deal with more patients. "Our doctors are happy with the quality of the images. The user interface is very simple and anybody, be it an echo technician or a resident or even a senior doctor, can get to know what to do at the end of a sitting. We don't need any high-level training,'' says Vemula.The compression also saves network bandwidth, even within an organisation.

There is almost no other competing software that can offer the degree of compression and guarantee against data loss as EchoView does, claims Vemula."We are also looking to expand the scope of the implementation to cardiac surgery departments so surgeons can quickly look at the image of the echo before going into surgery as well as request intra-operative echos to be taken," he says.

priya@thehindu.co.in

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