Added value solutions to help your healthcare industry application excel

The global medical technology market is set to reach revenue of over $768 billion by 2030.

This is largely driven by an aging world population, the prevalence of infectious and chronic diseases, technological innovation, and the expanding healthcare insurance sector, which is providing more access to new diagnostic and treatment technologies. Simultaneously, cost pressure scenarios are daily news, accelerating the need for cost-effective, future-proof solutions.

As the world rebounds from COVID-19 and the number of elective procedures returns to their pre-pandemic levels, increased incidence of chronic disease worldwide are driving the demand for high-quality diagnostic and treatment options among patients and doctors.

With the growing number of minimally invasive procedures, the technology being used in operating rooms is key for successful results, either in quality, reliability, and throughput. For example, there are traditional systems that rely on hardwired, point-to-point connections between endpoints to share video, audio, and generic data within different rooms — namely the technical room, control room, and exam room — making it challenging to change or optimize the preferred configuration for a clinician. Adding new devices such as displays or AI-enabled processing modules is physically challenging or simply not possible, making the systems less flexible and future-proof.

As such, experts and organizations in the interventional radiology and endoscopy industries are currently facing the continuous challenge of providing the latest technologies that improve the quality but maintain the lowest total cost of ownership of their overall solutions.

As healthcare applications have high expectations when it comes to device performance, finding the right technologies that increase performance while reducing costs can be very challenging.

Below we present the six added-value solutions in the healthcare market that deal with this challenge.

1. Audio Video Distribution

Hospital operating rooms (ORs) have many sources of imagery and footage, such as imaging devices (e.g., PACS data with CT, MRI, or digital X-ray footage) and live streams from endoscopes and interventional X-ray machines. This information is generated in various physical locations and needs to be available exactly when needed on display screens in the OR.

AVIDIS, a network-based audio-video distribution system, connects these many sources and displays without the need to have computers at each of these locations. Using a proprietary protocol that physically uses a 10GbE interface, AVIDIS streams up to 4K uncompressed video with zero delays from any source to any display. Additionally, software that adds functionality, such as live compositing, cropping, scaling, and overlaying, amongst other features, is readily available.

The network-based topology brings unprecedented flexibility. With all sinks and sources connected to a single network, many-to-many connections are easily established. Furthermore, the ability to easily add or change AVIDIS devices allows the system to be updated easily, extending the lifecycle of the product.

2. Centralized Management Software

Centralized Management is a convenient, easy-to-use tool for the diagnostics and management of multi-node and multi-rack systems. Failure and warning diagnostics of individual components like servers, cabinets, and switches are available on a single interface. With the rapidly increasing amount of digitalization and growth of data, this helps hospital IT managers to manage their mission-critical operations more efficiently and avoid/minimize downtime.

A Redfish-compliant API is provided, exposing all managed devices through a single aggregated API. Users can perform bulk management operations such as firmware upgrades or OS provisioning of all servers in the system simultaneously.

3. Rack Servers

Offering high reliability and a long lifecycle, scalable rack servers are the best fit for high-end embedded computing applications. This tough server helps even high-bandwidth applications, such as hospitals streaming multiple live 4K image feeds, to run efficiently.

The Zeus Scalable server series is volume optimized, reducing the footprint in the hospital, and can be customized to include up to fifteen endpoints with a mix of IPCs, servers, and displays. This extra performance translates into faster processing for data-intensive video streams but also presents new opportunities to consolidate hardware. As the deployment of AI algorithms in clinical practice escalates, Prodrive Technologies can support in selecting and optimizing the hardware acceleration that best fits the practice’s needs.

4. Industrial PC

Prodrive’s Industrial PC Series packs a lot of I/O and computing power in a small form factor, making it the choice for on-the-edge applications like point-of-care solutions. This makes this product fit for embedded applications connecting lots of sensors to lots of outputs, perfect for imaging in a hospital and operating room environment.