Fuji plunges into PACS market with Synapse

Computed radiography vendor Fuji Medical Systems USA (Hall A, #2732) will unveil its ambitious program to develop a new line of Windows NT-based PACS products called Synapse. The Stamford, CT, company believes that starting its development effort from scratch will enable it to incorporate a number of cutting-edge technologies into Synapse that are unavailable on older PACS products.

Two of the latest technologies are cascadable architecture and on-demand image review. Cascadable architecture is a new client-server configuration in which the archive's database management software runs on multiple hardware components distributed throughout a network. The technology is an alternative to dedicating an entire server to database management tasks, which can make expanding a PACS network more difficult, according to John Strauss, director of marketing for Fuji's new Imaging and Information Networks group.

On-demand image review provides an alternative to image auto-routing, in which images are automatically sent to specified workstations. With Fuji's on-demand software, images can be read with optimized protocols anywhere on the network, adding additional flexibility.

The first workstations in the Synapse line will be dedicated to computed radiography applications and will be shown in Fuji's RSNA booth. HI-C/QA is a quality-assurance workstation, while HI-C/NT is a CR image review workstation that will be expanded to support multimodality images. Fuji's workstations will come in 1K x 1K and 2K x 2.5K configurations, and the line will have native DICOM output.

Fuji plans to release HI-C/QA and HI-C/NT in the first quarter of 1998, with the rest of its PACS product line ready for commercial shipments by the end of next year, according to Clay Larsen, managing director of marketing.