MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota—Imbio, LLC, a diagnostic medical imaging software company, announced today that the company has exclusively licensed technology for evaluation of pulmonary embolisms developed by joint research between Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH).
Pulmonary Embolism (PE) is a potentially fatal condition where one or more of the arteries in the lungs become blocked by a blood clot. PE is usually detected on CT exams acquired when a patient arrives in the Emergency Department (ED) with shortness of breath or chest pain. Prompt and appropriate treatment is essential to prevent serious effects, or even death, so it is critical to identify quickly which patients are at greatest risk from the embolism. Over the past decade, medical researchers have determined that assessing the effect of the embolism on the heart can help predict which patients are most at risk of dying. In high-risk patients, the right ventricle of the heart is significantly larger than the left as a result of the load placed on the heart by the embolism. Unfortunately, the difficulty of accurately measuring and comparing the ventricles has limited use of this criterion in widespread clinical practice.
Medical researchers at MIT, UPM, and BWH have worked together to develop an automated computer analysis for CT images, using sophisticated image processing algorithms to make this measurement instead of requiring a radiologist to perform the measurement themselves. The state-of-the-art algorithm analyzes the ventricles from CT Pulmonary Angiography images used for PE diagnosis, and it outputs the axial RV/LV diameter ratio in a matter of minutes. The ultimate goal of the algorithm is to help identify which patients are likely to have early onset of heart failure allowing appropriate intervention before this can occur. Imbio plans to develop this algorithm into a commercial software application for routine clinical use in the ED, hosting the application on their proprietary IT platform so that the algorithm can run automatically when the CT images are acquired, without any user interaction or interruption to the ED workflow. This algorithm is the latest in a portfolio of image processing innovations licensed by Imbio from leading medical researchers, and will expand their offering for lung imaging.
Cynthia Maier, CEO of Imbio stated, “We are extremely pleased to have the opportunity to commercialize this transformative tool to help doctors with such a challenging diagnostic problem. The software is a valuable complement to Imbio’s other patient-centric applications, and we are very excited to make this application available as a clinical tool.”
About Imbio, LLC
Imbio, LLC, was founded to commercialize quantitative, unique, state-of-the-art imaging biomarkers developed by leading universities and research institutions. Imaging biomarkers are key drivers of personalized medicine. Imbio is developing and licensing several imaging biomarkers for pulmonology and oncology that will be hosted on the company’s Cloud and Enterprise platforms. For more information, visit www.imbio.com.
Contacts
Imbio, LLC
Can Akgun, Ph.D.
Business Development Manager
612-520-7360 x2132