Cedara to Showcase Applications That Enable Personalized Cancer Treatment

Cedara Software has announced its intention to showcase a variety of advanced clinical software solutions at the American Society of Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology Conference held October 16 - 20, 2005, in Denver, Colorado.

With a wealth of experience in developing disease centric solutions for healthcare specialists, Cedara will introduce a clinical product line named Cedara OncologyWorks at this year's ASTRO conference.

Applications demonstrated will include functional components designed to assist with therapy planning and response assessment through PET/CT fusion, magnetic resonance (MR) based functional diffusion mapping, tracking quantitative tumor measurements over time, advanced segmentation, web enabled patient follow-up management and more.

For areas such as image-guided radiotherapy, Cedara is also developing tools that could be used for multi-modality fusion and registration.

“ASTRO marks an excellent opportunity for us to demonstrate our progress with Cedara OncologyWorks,” said Harald Zachmann, Product Manager at Cedara Software.

“While Cedara has historically offered a variety of solutions in the screening, diagnostic and clinical application software space, OncologyWorks marks an expanded offering into new therapeutic processes.”

While traditional approaches to therapeutic assessment have focused on morphological imaging, a multitude of new molecular imaging techniques has created the potential to reduce therapeutic review periods from months to weeks.

By expediting therapy assessment, it is expected that patient care will be impacted through the creation of adaptive, personalized treatment programs.

It is also anticipated that go/no-go decisions in drug and radiopharmaceutical development will be positively affected through faster review periods.

Cedara OncologyWorks will address an industry wide need for efficient tools to evaluate tumor development over multiple time points on multiple imaging devices in therapeutic assessment.

Among the products demonstrated at ASTRO, Cedara will be highlighting progress in the development of its multi modality workstation Cedara I-Response™.

Cedara I-Response is a works-in-progress software solution that features an exclusive patented technology for molecular imaging known as MR diffusion weighted imaging (DWI).

Based on landmark work at the University of Michigan, the application was designed for cancer care.

Differing from standard techniques that use anatomical images to evaluate cancer treatment, functional diffusion imaging is an imaging technique that can visualize changes in tumor tissue resulting from cellular mechanisms; because of this, it has the potential to precisely monitor at an earlier point the impact of anti-cancer drugs and radiation therapy.

By giving radiologists, oncologists, researchers and others a sophisticated tool to study tumor activity at both the cellular and anatomical level, it is hoped that this technology may provide the foundation on which fast, efficient and personalized cancer treatment planning can develop.

Cedara will also showcase a variety of other developing technologies designed to further assist healthcare professionals through quantitative imaging for cancer care.

Among those are advanced segmentation techniques that are expected to positively impact radiotherapy planning processes.

“With over 20 years of experience, Cedara represents a significant knowledge base in medical imaging and data management that has helped our business partners generate more revenue and lower costs in radiology and clinical application development,” said Brian Pedlar, President of Cedara Software Corp.

“In furthering the impact of technology on cancer care, it is our goal to work together with biotechnology, pharmaceutical, device manufacturing, PACS, life science and research organizations to create customized imaging solutions that make our partners more successful.”

“In the pharmaceutical space for example, the far-reaching impact of this could be shortened drug development cycles, enabling research companies to reach go/no-go decisions sooner, leading to a host of benefits for patient comfort and care.”