From the July 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine



Help from CAD
Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) for tomosynthesis is also poised to assist radiologists in assessing 3-D images. iCAD recently released one of the industry’s first tomosynthesis (CAD) solutions in the U.S. market. While it can only be used with GE’s SenoClaire 3D Breast Tomosynthesis system and the new Senographe Pristina, iCAD is working on developing technology that can be used with scanners from other manufacturers, says Rodney Hawkins, vice president of marketing for iCAD.

The CAD solution for tomosynthesis is different from traditional CAD in that it has been approved for use concurrently during the primary read of the images, says Hawkins, as opposed to a second-read solution for 2-D images, with marks on the image.



“The radiologist won’t see CAD marks on the images,” he adds. “What they’re seeing are the actual suspicious findings as they appear in the tomosynthesis data. They’re not overly influenced by false positive marks.”

Hawkins says the technology also serves as a workflow efficiency tool to improve reading time — a common complaint among radiologists when reading tomosynthesis.

“Radiologists aren’t getting paid much more to read tomosynthesis images,” Hawkins says. “Our goal with the initial version was to create a workflow tool to help the radiologists rapidly get to what they need to spend their time looking at. Our algorithm runs on the tomo planes data and finds regions of interest.”

The CAD findings are blended into the 2-D synthetic image, which the radiologist uses to navigate into the tomo planes where the findings were detected.

“It saves them having to navigate through looking through every image two or three times sometimes, and creates a nice navigation tool,” Hawkins says.

The company built the tomosynthesis algorithm on “deep learning” technology,using actual patient data to train the algorithm on what the characteristics of a cancer are, “much like a radiologist,” Hawkins says. The technology is detecting more than 92 percent of soft tissue density cancers, versus around 85 percent detected for 2-D mammography CAD.

In Europe, the company has several sites live and one up and running in the U.S., with five sites that have ordered the product.

With the rise of digital breast tomosynthesis, iCAD has not seen a significant amount of growth for its 2-D mammography products.

“Clearly there’s a trend in the U.S. to move to tomosynthesis for primary screening,” Hawkins says. “About a third of the U.S. market has already adopted tomo, according to the latest Mammography Quality Standards Act data.”

July 2017 Magazine

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