January, 2013 -- Leiden, The Netherlands and Morrisville, NC —Leading Cardiac MRI Analysis developers partner to enhance end user experience in global distribution plan.

Medis medical imaging systems BV, and Diagnosoft, Inc. USA announce an agreement to package Diagnosoft’s patented and FDA cleared HARP technology for regional analysis and quantification with the widely used QMass MR Enterprise solution. The world’s largest cardiac MRI analysis software client base and future customers can now benefit from the unique and exceptional solutions developed by both organizations.

Johan (Hans) HC Reiber, PhD, CEO, Medis stated: "Diagnosoft is the world’s innovator and leader in MR strain analysis. We welcome their solution, allowing Medis to expand its CMR application portfolio offered to the global research and clinical community.”

Dr. Nael Osman, Co-Founder and CEO of Diagnosoft, stated: "This partnership represents the joining of two organizations steeped in product innovation and commitment to the advancement of the cardiac MRI modality. Researchers, clinicians, and cardiac patients across the globe will benefit from this relationship.”

About Medis medical imaging systems

Medis medical imaging systems bv is a leading provider of innovative quantification software solutions that enable clinicians, technicians and researchers to accurately quantify medical images. The company offers software solutions for a range of modalities (MRI, MSCT, X-ray angiography and intravascular imaging) and for the medical specialties of cardiology and radiology. Medis' global headquarters are in Leiden, the Netherlands, and the company has a subsidiary in Raleigh, NC, USA.

About Diagnosoft, Inc.

Diagnosoft® provides innovative software analysis tools focused on both research and clinical healthcare. Since 2007, the company has provided leading edge solutions to analyze and quantify cardiac magnetic resonance images. Diagnosoft is well known for developing HARP®, the only FDA 510k-cleared software for tagged MR images, which has been an essential component in over 180 publications advancing cardiovascular research. The company is based in the Research Triangle, NC, USA.

October, 2012 -- LUMC/Medis team wins MICCAI grand challenge: coronary stenoses detection and quantification

A growing phenomenon in the world of medical image processing is that of “Grand challenges”. The great advantage of such challenges is that all algorithms are evaluated on the same data and using the same evaluation procedure.

This year at the MICCAI conference the Biomedical Imaging Group Rotterdam of the Erasmus MC organized a challenge on the automatic detection and quantification of stenoses in coronary CTA data (http://coronary.bigr.nl/stenoses/). The challenge contained 48 multi-center multi-vendor CTA datasets. In total 11 teams from different institutes participated in the challenge. Teams had to (semi) automatically detect and quantify coronary lesions in the CTA datasets and submit their results to an online evaluation framework. Teams where ranked according to a number of criteria in three categories: detection (ability to detect significant stenoses), quantification (comparison with observer and QCA stenoses grades) and finally lumen segmentation (compared to observer drawn contours).

At the Division of Image Processing (LKEB), Department of Radiology at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), the CTA group have developed and validated robust algorithms for extraction and segmentation of coronary CTA data. This work has largely been done in within the STW CADAStr project in close collaboration with the LUMC department of cardiology and Medis medical imaging systems. These algorithms have already contributed to a number of international high ranking publications both from inside and outside the LUMC.

On the 1st of October, at the start of MICCAI 2012 conference in Nice, France a team from the LKEB/Medis (Alexander Broersen and Pieter Kitslaar), ranked 1st place in the detection and 2nd place in the quantification and segmentation categories. Based on these ranks, they were the overall winners of the on-site challenge. Congratulations, job very well done!! The algorithms are now part of the QAngio CT RE analytical software product; commercialized by Medis Specials bv (www.medisspecials.com) a Medis BV company.