Agfa HealthCare announced today that the new XERO Xtend features for its XERO Viewer were cleared by the FDA.

This is an optional feature set that adds 3-D processing capabilities and advanced clinical applications to the viewer. It's cleared for use on desktop devices, but not for mobile viewing at this time.

"XERO Xtend enables radiologists to visually review results in real time with primary care physicians, and have a collaborative dialogue that can directly impact patient care," Dr. Anjum M. Ahmed, senior global marketing manager at Agfa, told HCB News. "Similarly, Xtend can improve diagnostics by making it easier for a radiologist to collaborate with specialists on various devices, mobile or desktop. This collaboration can help improve turnaround times and quality of reports."
The XERO Xtend features are maximum intensity projection, multiplanar reconstruction and 3-D visualization tools. Those include center line, Cobb Angle, Hip-Knee-Ankle Angle orthopedic tools, displays for mammography and color highlighting palettes stored as window-level presets for nuclear medicine.

Agfa also expanded the types of modalities that the XERO Viewer offers diagnostic review and reporting for. Uncompressed or non-lossy compressed images intended for presentation can be used for diagnosis or screening purposes when viewed on FDA-cleared monitors.

In addition, the Full Fidelity Mobile functionality for mobile diagnostic review and analysis on an iPad, which received FDA clearance in 2015, now includes ECG images and reports.

The XERO Viewer received FDA clearance in June 2015 and over 500 had already been installed globally. It retrieves original-quality renditions of stored DICOM and non-DICOM DX, MR and ultrasound imaging data and presents them on a single desktop.

It has search, filter and discovery functions and allows the user to make annotations and markups, change brightness and contrast, and identify an area of interest and compare it with other studies.

The users can also view ECGs in different layouts, change the waveform size and amplitude, and compare the data with previous ECGs.

In February, the XERO Viewer won the 2017 KLAS Category Leader Award. In the KLAS Performance Report 2016, a customer explained that the viewer "is great because it is web-based and it allows our radiologists to look at images from their houses."

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