Philips Medical Systems: Collecting Patient Data Using an Eye in

SKYLight, the world's first overhead gamma camera system, changed how nuclear medicine practitioners collect valuable data on their patients. The SKYLight gamma camera hangs from a steel framework, with two camera lenses placed onto articulating robotic arms. Because the equipment can be positioned around the patient in a highly flexible way, doctors can keep patients sitting or laying comfortably while conducting hour-long scans of internal organs. The entire SKYLight system is controlled with sophisticated software programs running on the rock-solid technology platform of UltraSPARC hardware and Solaris Operating Environment from Sun Microsystems. Using Sun technologies to run critical components of its innovative camera system helped Philips Nuclear Medicine stay focused on its core competency: delivering the highest quality nuclear imaging capabilities in an innovative form factor that can help improve overall patient care. In its work with Philips Nuclear Medicine, Sun helped create a technology infrastructure that supports the way medical experts do their jobs. The SKYLight gamma camera and Pegasys processing station helps nuclear medicine specialists share critical patient data and collaborate to arrive at complete and precise diagnoses.

Once in awhile, an idea comes along that makes a whole industry rethink its approach. That's what happened when Philips Nuclear Medicine, a division of Philips Medical Systems, in Milpitas, California, introduced SKYLight, the world's first overhead gamma camera system.

For decades, nuclear medicine has relied on traditional imaging equipment, using cumbersome donut-shaped cameras that require patients to be inserted into them, head first, on a narrow platform or gantry. With the advent of Philips' SKYLight system, that paradigm changed dramatically. The SKYLight gamma camera hangs from a steel framework, with two camera lenses placed onto articulating robotic arms. Because the equipment can be positioned around the patient in a highly flexible way, doctors can keep patients sitting or laying comfortably while conducting hour-long scans of internal organs, gathering data that can be used for early diagnosis of life-threatening diseases and other critical medical conditions.

Under the Hood

The entire SKYLight system is controlled with sophisticated software programs running on the rock-solid technology platform of UltraSPARC hardware and Solaris Operating Environment from Sun Microsystems. Two key systems—the JETStream acquisition station and the Pegasys processing station—power the engine and provide diagnostic capabilities for the SKYLight imaging system. Using Sun technologies to run critical components of its innovative camera system helped Philips Nuclear Medicine stay focused on its core competency: delivering the highest quality nuclear imaging capabilities in an innovative form factor that can help improve overall patient care.

Sun technologies bring key capabilities to the Philips SKYLight camera system, including:

• Reliable, robust computing engine for gathering imaging data and controlling key systems
• Real-time manipulation of patient data, animations, and images
• 3-D rendering with the Sun graphics accelerator technology
• Network connectivity using secure, standard Internet protocols
• Support for role-based workflow, including ability to securely share data between nuclear medicine specialists and physicians

Stringent Requirement

In nuclear medicine, 24x7 uptime is not just a preferred attribute—it's a requirement. The SKYLight gamma camera uses an embedded SPARCengine UltraAXi motherboard running the Solaris 8 Operating Environment to gather data during the imaging procedure. It is critically important that this acquisition system does not falter, since the scanning process relies on gathering data from radioactive chemicals that have been injected into a patient's bloodstream. Since biochemical reactions only persist for a short time, there's no leeway for computer downtime during the data acquisition phase. There's no time for fiddling with or rebooting a balky PC. The acquisition system should be always on, always available, and always responsive.

The acquisition system and all the other systems of the SKYLight network are controlled through a front-end device called the JETStream acquisition station. JETStream uses standard networking protocols and a Javatechnology-based user interface to control and manage the SKYLight network, which connects camera systems with the acquisition server, communicates imaging procedures to the robotic arms, schedules patient procedures, and generates patient records.

Because this interface is written in Javaprogramming language, JETStream is highly flexible and can accommodate new functionality over time, as new imaging procedures and protocols are developed.

Processing Power

Once patients have completed a scan, a nuclear medicine technologist manipulates and analyzes the data on a specially configured workstation. Philips' Pegasys processing station uses a Sun' s Ultra10 workstation with a Creator3D graphics accelerator and third party imaging software to render images of the body's internal organs.

For years, Philips Nuclear Medicine developed its own proprietary graphics cards to handle the complex algorithms and real-time 3-D data sets of its imaging camera, which can show a beating heart, the perfusion of blood through the muscle, or the circulatory path from a tumor to a lymph node, in real time.

Today, Philips Nuclear Medicine can use Sun's 3-D graphics cards to provide those same rendering capabilities off the shelf, saving valuable time, resources, and development cycles for Philips engineers. Since Sun's graphics subsystems support open industry standards such as OpenGL, it was a fairly simple proposition for Philips to move from its proprietary graphics hardware to a Sun graphics card and retain its code base and hardware setup. Using off-the-shelf components that deliver performance and reliability saves cycles for Philips and lets the company take advantage of existing third-party applications instead of developing software in-house.

Sun's OEM Business

For more than a decade, Sun has been helping medical equipment providers create products with an extraordinary degree of reliability and availability. Sun technology is designed to be highly scalable and to support open industry standards, which helps the sophisticated products that use Sun components scale to meet high performance demands and accommodate changes over time, as advancements are made in life sciences.

"Sun helps OEMs develop excellent products and bring them to market in a cost-competitive way. We provide proven technologies—boards, processors, systems, software, and components—which our partners can use to embed specific functionality or to create an entire end-to-end solution," said Kris Snow, senior director of Sun's Global OEM Business Office. "Sun makes these components available off the shelf, with a full set of programs and services to back them up, so OEMs can stay focused on their core competencies, driving development time out of the equation and enabling faster time-to-market."

Sun has been in the OEM business since its inception in 1982. Across its business practices and policies, Sun has delivered initiatives that support the needs of its OEM partners. Those initiatives include product change notifications to help OEMs be competitive in their markets and delivery of early access technology, so OEMs can develop their products in parallel with Sun and go to market with the latest technologies without a significant lag time to test and qualify the components. That can add up to a serious time-to-market advantage on cutting-edge products that stand out in the marketplace.

The Way We Work

In its work with Philips Nuclear Medicine, Sun helped create a technology infrastructure that supports the way medical experts do their jobs. The SKYLight gamma camera and Pegasys processing station helps nuclear medicine specialists share critical patient data and collaborate to arrive at complete and precise diagnoses. Hospitals and clinics can take advantage of the networking capabilities of the Pegasys workstations, hitching them together to share patient data across department-wide networks.

Effectively, treatment centers can create distributed networks out of highly specialized medical equipment, enabling user-centric workflow solutions that help doctors work together more efficiently.

For example, a hospital or treatment center can place SKYLight systems—the gamma cameras, data acquisition systems, and Pegasys processing stations—onto a department-wide network and have them interoperate using industry-standard networking protocols. Using standard technology such as a network file system (NFS) server can allow physicians to access patient records from any workstation on the network, regardless of the gamma camera where the record was created. Support for standards also helps hospitals and care centers maintain the data integrity of their patient records for years to come.

Sun's support of open industry protocols helps OEMs such as Philips Nuclear Medicine create products that support the way highly trained professionals want to do their work—efficiently, intuitively, and cost-effectively. Now, that's good science.