GE Sells Value-Based Healthcare Division to Veritas
GE continued its financial turnaround and organizational refocusing, announcing the sale of its value-based healthcare division to private equity firm Veritas Capital for $1.05 billion in cash. The deal will include all three parts of GE’s value-based healthcare division: enterprise financial management (Centricity Business), ambulatory care management (Centricity Practice Solution), and workforce management (formerly API Healthcare). GE assured that it will continue to offer HIT solutions in data analytics, command centers, advanced visualization, and image management and will will invest in its core digital solutions, including smart diagnostics, connected devices, AI, and enterprise imaging. The acquisition follows several healthcare investments by Veritas, Truven Health Analytics and Verscend Technologies, and comes several years after Veritas acquired GE’s embedded systems business (non-healthcare).

Hyland Integrates PACSgear and OnBase
Hyland Healthcare updated its PACSgear Core 3.6 connectivity platform, allowing it to store images and video directly to OnBase, in addition to XDS and DICOM destinations. The integration complements MDR Video Touch and PACS Scan Mobile deployments and gives OnBase users more options for capturing patient images and videos directly from medical scopes and mobile devices. The integration comes roughly 10 months after Hyland acquired Lexmark’s software assets, including PACSgear, Acuo, Perceptive, Gnax, and Claron Technology.

Auris Health Introduces Monarch Endoscope Platform
Auris Health unveiled its now-FDA-cleared Monarch Platform for robotic endoscopic lung navigation system, which reportedly helps physicians reach more places within the lungs and find smaller lesions. This is the first FDA clearance for Auris Health, which was founded by surgical robotics pioneer Frederic Moll, M.D., and has raised more than $500 million in equity capital.

ACR and MICCAI Partner to Develop Radiology AI
The American College of Radiology (ACR) and the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society (MICCAI) announced a partnership that is intended to develop medical imaging AI algorithms that improve radiologists’ daily workflows. Through the partnership, ACR’s expert panels will identify issues that could be improved with AI solutions and MICCAI will host developer challenge events to solve these ACR-provided issues.

Shimadzu Ramps Up Manufacturing
Shimadzu opened a new medical imaging manufacturing building in Shimane, Japan that it expects will increase output capacity by 1.5x following completion in early 2019. The new facility is expected to bring improvements to Shimadzu’s logistics and assembly operations, add more automated systems, and enhance its product design and prototyping capabilities.

The Wire

• Singular Medical Technologies expanded its PACStation suite, launching the PACStation-GO portable reading workstation with two full-size diagnostic monitors and PACStation-Mobile for emergency and operating rooms.

• Hitachi invested in a fund managed by Geodesic Capital that accelerates Silicon Valley startups, targeting IoT, robotics, and digital technologies (not necessarily medical imaging).

• NTT DATA partnered with DataFirst to provide a solution that helps healthcare organizations better-use imaging data, combining NTT DATA’s imaging analytics and consulting with DataFirst’s interoperability solutions.

• Fresh from a $234 million investment to drive growth, Radiology Partners signed Access Radiology (Louisiana’s largest radiology practice), bringing the company into Louisiana and Mississippi for the first time, and giving it a presence in more than 550 sites across 16 states.

• SpinTech Imaging received FDA 510(k) clearance to market its SPIN-SWI Enhanced Brain Imaging software, its first in a series of MRI processing tools intended to enhance visualization, quantification, and automatic detection of key neurovascular biomarkers.

• Canada’s National Research Universal (NRU) nuclear reactor went offline, eliminating a key historical source of molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), but also one with a history of shutdowns that hasn’t produced isotopes since 2016.

• MIT researchers developed an endoscope as thin as a human hair (125 microns) that can image the activity of neurons in the brains of living mice, surpassing microscopes and other types of endoscopes.

• Medtronic is launching a $1.2 billion share and debt buyback effort that will run through its 2019 fiscal year.

• Recent research in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine suggests that diagnostic bone SPECT/CT is more accurate and cost effective in evaluating total knee replacement patients, saving $1.72M compared to (MARS)-MRI and $1.87 million compared to CT alone over 3 years.

• A team of Chinese physicists made detailed x-ray images using a statistical technique called ghost imaging, which connects a single-pixel camera to a patterned light source, and could eventually capture clear x-ray photographs with much lower-cost and lower-radiation technology than today’s methods.

The Resource Wire

• Agfa whitepaper on augmented intelligence and intelligent workflows
• Caresteam video interview details Clinical Collaboration Platform success story
• Canon and Toshiba publish “New Horizons in Ultrasound” report
• Fujifilm video outlines its women’s health solutions
• GE video overview on Centricity Universal Viewer
• IBM Watson post highlights client success at The Iowa Clinic
• Konica Minolta publishes latest Kontours issue
• Olympus webinar on bringing endoscopic ultrasound to community hospitals
• Olympus video on the benefits of using CO2 in endoscopy
• Philips article highlights pediatric radiology innovations
• Philips video highlights its radiology solutions at ECR 2018
• Philips article on managing cybersecurity risks in healthcare
• Siemens video on digitalizing healthcare in radiology
• Siemens and the HBR’s perspective on transforming care delivery
• Siemens and the HBR paper on “The Power of Digitalizing Healthcare”
• Siemens video on expanding precision medicine with BioMatrix technology