Medison subsidiary Mediface plans entry into U.S. PACS market

Medison subsidiary Mediface plans entry into U.S. PACS market

Company seeks OEM relationships for its technology

You can add another Korean PACS firm to the list of companies planning to expand their global presence. On the heels of Samsung's decision to enter the U.S. PACS market (PNN 9/98), Seoul, South Korea-based Mediface is planning to enter the U.S. sector in early 1999 as a supplier to PACS OEMs.

As part of this move, Mediface will open one or two offices in the U.S. to support its sales efforts. Manufacturing will remain at Mediface headquarters in South Korea.

"We're going to try, and if we don't succeed, we'll come back," said Steven Hwang, international marketing manager. "But we have some relationships with big companies in the U.S. and have some positive signs for entering the U.S. market."

Mediface, a subsidiary of ultrasound firm Medison, has been developing PACS technology since 1994. In early 1995, the company participated in a PACS project at Samsung Medical Center, and in March 1997, the firm installed a CT and MR PACS at Youngdong Severance Hospital. In July 1997 Mediface installed a PACS network in the radiology department of Yonsei University Medical Center. The company later added a teleradiology system at that location. Mediface has now installed its PACS at seven hospitals in South Korea.

Mediface has several products that have received Food and Drug Administration 510(k) clearance. PiView is the firm's workstation offering, a Windows 95/NT-based package that can serve as the viewing workstation component of a full-scale Mediface PACS or as a personal image management system on a PC. It supports DICOM query/retrieve, DICOM store, and DICOM print functions and can run on resolutions up to 2.5K x 2K, according to the firm. Both color and gray-scale images can be viewed on PiView.

For archiving and transmission of medical images, Mediface offers Spectra, a DICOM image server and integrated radiology information system that can handle all information related to radiology, including patient and examination data. Automatic prefetching and autorouting of images can be performed. Available in Sun or Windows NT-based versions, Spectra can employ several storage media, including digital linear tape, magneto-optical disks, and CD-ROM. With Spectra, image information can be stored via lossless compression in a hierarchical management concept, according to the company. Spectra can be configured in a centralized or distributed architecture and supports DICOM query/ retrieve and storage classes. In addition, dermatology, pathology, and endoscopy images can be incorporated into the PACS database, allowing users to gain a broader image management system.

Teleradiology capabilities are provided by the company's NetGate software product. For video image acquisition, Mediface markets VideoLink, a video acquisition gateway that converts images acquired from non-DICOM modality devices to DICOM images, and transmits them to the image server. PrintLink is the company's DICOM print server for non-DICOM laser cameras, while ScanLink serves as the firm's DICOM film digitizer acquisition workstation.

Mediface has also developed InterView, an offering that allows users access to the image server using a Web browser. JPEG-compressed images are currently transmitted by InterView, although wavelet techniques are under development. The company is also developing Hyper PACS, a product that would accommodate input from up to 300 modalities. Mediface will be demonstrating its wares for the first time at this month's Radiological Society of North America meeting.

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