Medasys and Digital Design plan joint gamma camera effort

Merger to be second in a year for Medasys

Medasys is at it again. The Ann Arbor, MI, vendor this month revealedplans to merge with Digital Design Medical Systems, a camera andworkstation developer based in Norcross, GA. The move would bethe second such deal in a year for Medasys, which last year mergedwith gamma camera refurbisher Encore Medical Systems (SCAN 6/16/93).

The new company would be merged with JOD Electronique S.A.,with its stock publicly traded on the Paris stock exchange. Themerger is contingent on shareholder approval, which is expectedsoon, according to Thomas Bergquist, vice president of DigitalDesign.

The merger would be a good fit of two companies with differentapproaches to the same market. Digital Design is a vendor of low-costgamma cameras, workstations and PAC systems. Medasys is a providerof Pinnacle nuclear medicine workstations and, through its previousmerger with Encore, a refurbisher of gamma cameras.

"Medasys brings to the merger a large installed customerbase and a heritage of good nuclear medicine protocols, whichwe intend to merge into our system," said Bergquist, whoquickly added that the merger will not lead to the demise of thePinnacle product line. "We're not going to in any way shapeor form kill the Pinnacle. We will continue to support all ofthe Medasys customers out there," he said.

Digital Design brings an installed customer base of its own,Bergquist said, with a very good sized service and sales organization,and a product line that includes image processing hardware andsoftware.

Specifically, Digital Design offers several products:

** An economical rectangular-head SPECT gamma camera, calledCrystal, that is integrated with a Hewlett-Packard UNIX-basedworkstation;

** A nuclear medicine workstation called DxCrystal; and

** The Dx MultiModality computer system for image integration.

The Dx MultiModality can interconnect Crystal to other gammacameras, as well as to MRI, CT and other types of scanners. Thesystem serves as a solution for integrating images from differentsystems into ACR-NEMA's DICOM 3.0 interface and allows distributionof those images by networking to X-Windows terminals and sendingthe images out for teleradiology.

Pinnacle workstations by Medasys have been widely used to upgradeaging gamma cameras. With the merger last year of Medasys andEncore Medical Systems, the company added a new dimension -- theability to integrate and ship refurbished systems, but also themanufacturing capability to produce entirely new gamma camerasand integrated computer systems. When the Medasys/Encore mergerwas announced last year, company executives noted that the companymight use those resources to develop a low-cost SPECT system.

The pending merger with Digital Design may impact those plans.

"Digital Design is bringing a new camera to this merger,so it would be unwise to reinvent the wheel," Bergquist said.

The refurbishing business will continue to operate, but willdo so separately from the sale of new equipment, he said.