Step-by-step cases frame Workstation Face-Off

Three cases-one for the colon, a second in cardiology, and a third addressing the liver-will serve as the playing fields for this year’s Workstation Face-Off. Seven companies will go head to head Wednesday May 19 from 3:30 to 6 p.m. with luminaries putting their workstations through carefully choreographed steps.

Vital Images will bring three physician-customers to champion their product; GE Healthcare will bring two . Philips, Siemens, Carestream, TeraRecon, and Ziosoft will each field just one operator. All operators will follow exactly the same instructions, demonstrating workflow and image quality on their respective workstations, all within the same four-minute time frame for each case.

Case 1 – Screening for colon polyps:

• Load and coregister prone and supine data sets

• Subtract tagged fecal material

• Apply CAD to find, identify, and measure polyps, then illustrate how the polyp location would be conveyed to the gastroenterologist. text

Case 2 – Aortic valvular stenosis as part of a preoperative evaluation:

• Load the 4D data set, then extract and segment the heart

• Demonstrate aortic valve morphology

• Segment the lumen and outer wall of the left ventricle

• Quantify the left ventricular mass

• Segment the right ventricle and quantifying the right ventricular ejection fraction

Case 3 – Evaluation of a patient with metastatic cholangiocarcinoma on experimental treatment:

• Establishing the size of two dominant lesions in the liver to determine their growth (or lack of it) as an indicator of therapy response

• Isolating the lesions using segmentation, RECIST criteria and tumor volume to assess lesion size

Rules of engagement prohibit the use of prerendering.

“No matter how fast you can switch from screen to screen to pick up on presaved views, the sophisticated audience can see what you are doing,” the rules advise.

If Face-Off moderator Dr. Geoffrey Rubin does as he has in the past, he will remind operators to fully magnify and zoom in on findings, a rule often overlooked under the time constraints of the demonstrations, time constraints that have been, and will be again this year, strictly enforced.