Aurora CEO highlights new breast imaging technologies

CHICAGO—Aurora Imaging Technologies launched its AuroraEDGE and ThinClient technologies at this year's Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) meeting, about which Aurora President and CEO Olivia Ho Cheng spoke with Health Imaging News.

The company said that its AuroraEDGE improves image resolution and reduces breast MRI artifacts for images of both breasts, axillae, chest wall and mediastinum in a single, 3D bilateral scan through its pulse sequence and imaging acquisition system. The new acquisition software is used to oversample for a larger field-of-view to reduce aliasing. The 3D image resolution is 512 x 512 and the 250 slices are 0.7 mm in thickness.

“With AuroraEDGE, we technologically tried to achieve a higher resolution, and we are able to generate 0.7 millimeters in slice thickness to see more and more detail,” Olivia Ho Cheng, president and CEO of Aurora, told Health Imaging News. “In the imaging world, you are constantly fighting with artifacts, such as heart motion. With AuroraEDGE, we have produced a patent-pending technology to get rid of almost all artifacts, but still able to achieve higher image resolution through thinner slices.”

“As a company, we are consistently focused on how to improve the technologies of breast imaging,” Cheng said.

Aurora also launched its ThinClient to provide radiologists the ability to access patient images anytime, anywhere, including the functionalities of AuroraCAD. The ThinClient server allows for multiple users the ability to review images remotely.

“With MRI, you generate a lot of images, so that one patient is a half gigabyte of data. The radiologist needs to be able to access that data, along with the CAD [computer-aided detection] software, in order to make a proper diagnosis,” Cheng explained. “ThinClient provides a server, where the data was generated and where the software resides. Through a secure VPN, the radiologist is able to access the data and software applications from anywhere, at any time.”

“This allows either the radiologist or the referring physician to access the information,” she noted.

Cheng concluded that ThinClient will offer more efficient patient care and foster physician communication because multiple users can read patient images simultaneously.

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