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The global medical technology market is set to reach revenue of over $768 billion by 2030. This is largely driven by an aging world population, the prevalence of infectious and chronic diseases, technological innovation, and the expanding healthcare insurance sector, which is providing more access to new diagnostic and treatment technologies. Simultaneously, cost pressure scenarios are daily news, accelerating the need for cost-effective, future-proof solutions.
As the world rebounds from COVID-19 and the number of elective procedures returns to their pre-pandemic levels, increased incidence of chronic disease worldwide are driving the demand for high-quality diagnostic and treatment options among patients and doctors.
With the growing number of minimally invasive procedures, the technology being used in operating rooms is key for successful results, either in quality, reliability, and throughput. For example, there are traditional systems that rely on hardwired, point-to-point connections between endpoints to share video, audio, and generic data within different rooms — namely the technical room, control room, and exam room — making it challenging to change or optimize the preferred configuration for a clinician. Adding new devices such as displays or AI-enabled processing modules is physically challenging or simply not possible, making the systems less flexible and future-proof.
As such, experts and organizations in the interventional radiology and endoscopy industries are currently facing the continuous challenge of providing the latest technologies that improve the quality but maintain the lowest total cost of ownership of their overall solutions.
As healthcare applications have high expectations when it comes to device performance, finding the right technologies that increase performance while reducing costs can be very challenging.
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Below we present the six added-value solutions in the healthcare market that deal with this challenge.
1. Audio Video Distribution
Hospital operating rooms (ORs) have many sources of imagery and footage, such as imaging devices (e.g., PACS data with CT, MRI, or digital X-ray footage) and live streams from endoscopes and interventional X-ray machines. This information is generated in various physical locations and needs to be available exactly when needed on display screens in the OR.
AVIDIS, a network-based audio-video distribution system, connects these many sources and displays without the need to have computers at each of these locations. Using a proprietary protocol that physically uses a 10GbE interface, AVIDIS streams up to 4K uncompressed video with zero delays from any source to any display. Additionally, software that adds functionality, such as live compositing, cropping, scaling, and overlaying, amongst other features, is readily available.
The network-based topology brings unprecedented flexibility. With all sinks and sources connected to a single network, many-to-many connections are easily established. Furthermore, the ability to easily add or change AVIDIS devices allows the system to be updated easily, extending the lifecycle of the product.
2. Centralized Management Software
Centralized Management is a convenient, easy-to-use tool for the diagnostics and management of multi-node and multi-rack systems. Failure and warning diagnostics of individual components like servers, cabinets, and switches are available on a single interface. With the rapidly increasing amount of digitalization and growth of data, this helps hospital IT managers to manage their mission-critical operations more efficiently and avoid/minimize downtime.
A Redfish-compliant API is provided, exposing all managed devices through a single aggregated API. Users can perform bulk management operations such as firmware upgrades or OS provisioning of all servers in the system simultaneously.
3. Rack Servers
Offering high reliability and a long lifecycle, scalable rack servers are the best fit for high-end embedded computing applications. This tough server helps even high-bandwidth applications, such as hospitals streaming multiple live 4K image feeds, to run efficiently.
The Zeus Scalable server series is volume optimized, reducing the footprint in the hospital, and can be customized to include up to fifteen endpoints with a mix of IPCs, servers, and displays. This extra performance translates into faster processing for data-intensive video streams but also presents new opportunities to consolidate hardware. As the deployment of AI algorithms in clinical practice escalates, Prodrive Technologies can support in selecting and optimizing the hardware acceleration that best fits the practice’s needs.
4. Industrial PC
Prodrive’s Industrial PC Series packs a lot of I/O and computing power in a small form factor, making it the choice for on-the-edge applications like point-of-care solutions. This makes this product fit for embedded applications connecting lots of sensors to lots of outputs, perfect for imaging in a hospital and operating room environment.
The Poseidon Industrial PC can be customized to the specific medical application’s needs by selecting the most ideal CPU, GPU, size of the system memory, or amount of storage needed. Combining the long-life cycles, it is a good fit for embedded applications.
5. Add-in Cards and COM Express Processors
Prodrive Technologies offers a range of add-in cards for embedded applications that can be combined with PC offerings. The add-in cards are optimized to handle and process large amounts of data, like raw data acquisition in ultrasound applications, but also complex compositing of lossless video streams in an interventional image-guided system application. The Apollo Aria 10 Series add-in cards have high-bandwidth interfaces and are FPGA based. In addition, for CPU offloading and generic purpose computing, the Apollo Zynq Ultrascale+ Series provides an FPGA with Arm CPUs.
Additionally, the portfolio includes COM Express modules based on the latest technology. “Atlas” is based on the 12th generation Intel Core processor and is the first of the product lines to introduce support for DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 interconnects.
Our COM express processors have enabled healthcare computing applications to benefit from greater customization and integration options. Instead of using a single PCB, businesses can combine this COM Express module with a separate carrier board, a more flexible and simple way to upgrade and maintain systems. This is ideal for point-of-care solutions where intensive computing applications are required.
6. NVIDIA IGX Edge AI Platform
NVIDIA IGX is a hardware and software platform that delivers secure, low-latency AI inference to meet the clinical demand for instant insights from a range of devices and sensors for medical applications, including robotic-assisted surgery and patient monitoring.
The IGX platform supports NVIDIA Clara Holoscan, a domain-specific platform that allows medical-device developers to bridge edge, on-premises data centers, and cloud services — enabling the rapid development of new, software-defined devices that bring the latest AI applications directly into the operating room.
The new edge platform device line is inspired by the need from medical device companies, such as ultrasound and endoscopy manufacturers, to process AI algorithms on their data in real time.
Prodrive Technologies’ medical edge device product line is taking on the challenge of deploying AI applications at scale in clinical practices. It aims to offer the computer processing power required for AI applications while keeping and extending the I/O and video processing capabilities. In addition, it serves to extend these possibilities with future-proof AI-processing.
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Prodrive Technologies leverages its 29 years of experience in multiple markets to create meaningful, flexible and innovative healthcare solutions at a competitive price and performance level.
OEMs can also challenge us with their existing portfolio of products for our manufacturing services and can benefit from higher quality levels and a lower total cost of ownership. Our medical industry technologies are all operated under the ISO13485 standard for Quality Management Systems.