Three Palm Software has announced the new release, version 1.4, of its mammography reading software, WorkstationOne™. This new release will be shown at RSNA 2009, in the company's booth, # 1506. The new release adds new capabilities to the best-in-breed mammography viewer. The company specializes in this technology, which distinguishes them from generalized PACS companies.

"There are dedicated workstations like ours that specialize in mammography and then there are the PACS vendors that have viewers for all modalities with some support for mammography," said Patrick Heffernan, CTO of the Los Gatos, California Company. "In screening mammography, the need is for high efficiency -- typically a radiologist may read between 30 and 50 cases per hour-- and this is where a dedicated workstation excels."

A generic PACS viewer might work for a low volume site, he noted, but for sites with high volume, or those interested in the highest efficiency and accuracy, the workflow and tools in WorkstationOne are essential.
"Some PACS companies have a limited solution for Mammography, but even in those cases, there is a need for a dedicated mammography workstation," Heffernan added. An example of a company which is strong in PACS, but offers a dedicated workstation, is NovaRad, whose recently introduced "NovaMG" option to their PACS is based on Three Palm Software's WorkstationOne technology.

Three Palm Software's workstation technology can be installed on an off-the-shelf PC and supports the leading display systems.

"We have a number of things to enable radiologists to both quickly read the case and, we believe, do it more accurately," Heffernan told DOTmed News.

Specifically, he explained that WorkstationOne software supports the systematic viewing approach that is based on the expert viewing methodology and that was originally developed for viewing films. The idea of systematic viewing is to use a number of "masks" to enhance perception of subtle radiographic abnormalities. By use of these masks, special attention can be given to asymmetric densities in regions with a high probability of malignant lesions.

"There is a school of thought that says that systematic masking is a valuable technique. We are the only vendor that provides this masking feature; with appropriate use of this technique the radiologist can be more thorough," Heffernan said.

Another enhanced tool is "all-pixel" viewing, a way of looking at the high resolution images independent of the monitor resolution and source image resolution. This technique provides the ability to view all of the actual pixels in the images with optimal reading speed, as distinguished from quadrant views.

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