Voxel shows progress at RSNA show

Medical holography developer Voxel displayed the progress it is making toward financial health at this month's Radiological Society of North America meeting in Chicago. The Laguna Hills, CA, company is close to finalizing its sale to a Florida holography company. Voxel also rolled out a new business strategy that it believes is more in line with most hospitals' capital equipment purchasing.

Voxel has been operating under the protection of a California bankruptcy court since June, after it was unable to pay an arbitration award of $1.9 million to former manufacturing partner General Scanning of Watertown, MA. In September, Voxel announced that its bankruptcy trustee had agreed to sell the company to Holographic Dimensions, a Miami-based firm that is interested in entering the medical imaging market (SCAN 9/30/98). That deal should be complete by the end of this year, according to Raymond Schulz, Voxel's director of marketing and one of five Voxel employees who remain at the company.

In Voxel's booth at the RSNA meeting, the company discussed its new business strategy of selling its 3-D holographic Voxgram images to hospitals on a per-use basis, rather than requiring healthcare facilities to buy the equipment to both produce and read Voxgrams themselves. Hospitals can send CT or MRI data over the Internet to Voxel, which will produce the holograms using its in-house holographic camera and ship the Voxgrams back to the facility overnight for $150. Hospitals must still purchase a special holographic light box to read the images, at a cost of $1500.

Voxel executives believe the new strategy will lower the cost at which hospitals can begin using Voxel technology. Under the company's prior strategy, hospitals had to lease holographic equipment at a cost of $75,000 over four years. Voxel's technology is reimbursable under a CPT code that pays about $133 for 3-D reconstruction and/or holography of CT and MRI images, according to Schulz.