With summer now upon us, we've packed our bags and taken a trip across the shores to see how Barco Healthcare products have recently been used to enhance clinical practice and improve healthcare outcomes around the globe.


First stop - Brazil.

Breast screening has progressed rapidly in recent years, most prominently due to the evolution of tomosynthesis, a breast imaging technique that creates a 3D picture of the breast, providing radiologists with clear, highly focused images to examine. The Centro de Diagnósticos Brasil (CDB)-Premium pioneered the new technology in 2010, following the initiative of radiologist Dr. Aron Belfer, who believed it was the next great technology in mammography.

"I've tried several other displays but only Barco's Mammo Tomosynthesis 5MP offers the brightness, high resolution, contrast and speed of processing that this technology requires," he says. Dr. Belfer was even more impressed with the brand-new Coronis Uniti, the first display explicitly designed for both PACS and breast imaging and 'incredibly useful for digital breast tomosynthesis", when he tried out the new product at ECR 2015.

Across to Columbia, we caught up with Dr. Alfonso Lozano, Neuroradiologist at the Centro de Imágenes in Bogotá.

As a member of the Colombian society of radiologists and a professor at the National University of Colombia, Dr. Lozano knows what it takes to make high-quality diagnoses. "A good diagnostic display system is a medical-grade system that ensures permanent, consistent brightness over time," he says. At the public hospital where he's working, he relies on Barco's Coronis Fusion 6MP display system for reading all kinds of medical images.

Next, we visited the Shandong Provincial Hospital in Jinan, China.

When the Shandong Provincial Hospital group looked to upgrade its telemedicine capabilities, Barco Healthcare stepped up to the plate. Throughout 2014, a network of 204 hospitals, dotted across the Shandong province and other parts of western China, was provided with a total of 408 Eonis 22" clinical displays.

Specialists from Shandong Provincial Hospital offer guidance and expert advice to a host of subsidiary clinics and hospitals in the region. For them, image quality is paramount. Regardless of whether images are viewed in the Shandong Provincial Hospital or on a screen in one of its remote subsidiaries, the content should be displayed consistently, right down to the smallest detail.

Next stop, India.

With 25 medical facilities, Columbia Asia is one of the largest hospital chains in Asia. One of its main assets is an unremitting commitment to ensure its staff has access to the best-in-class medical equipment. In its flagship hospital in Bangalore, Barco's diagnostic display systems and MediCal QAWeb automated Quality Assurance service were installed to guarantee precise, DICOM-calibrated images at all times.

Final destination - Europe. Back in Europe, we touched base with our partners at Augsburg Hospital in Germany to see how Barco Healthcare is being used to support the hospital's surgical teams. Each year, nearly 34,000 procedures are carried out in this 1,400 bed hospital. When a new building was added, the ORs were renovated and the latest technology was added, including Barco's Nexxis for OR, a fully IP-centric solution for image distribution in the operating room. A total of 26 ORs are currently ready for the multitude of surgical procedures.

Coming to the end of our summer vacation, we have learned one thing for certain. Regardless of location, with the right tools available, practitioners can benefit from the advances of technology and healthcare imaging, with the opportunity to gain better visibility, image consistency and improved working efficiency. Here at Barco, we look forward to continue working with and supporting practitioners and hospitals worldwide, to achieve better healthcare outcomes on a global scale.

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