Multinational tech giant Sony hosted a number of demos last week of NUCLeUS, its FDA-pending medical imaging software platform.

Presented at its Sony Square NYC location, the video-over-IP solution is designed to create a more streamlined, user-friendly imaging workflow and route visual information such as video and audio to any location of a hospital at any time. It can support multi-format, multi-standard and resolutions up to 4K.

“To run an OR room today without some video integration solution is really difficult to impossible. You can have all your different sources in there but to freely, quickly and on the fly move and route your images from one screen to the next, you need some sort of an AV solution to do that,” Matt Tosch, hospital business development manager for Sony Electronics Professional Solutions Americas, told HCB News. “For years, AV routing and switching has been a big part of what Sony’s focus has been in a lot of other sectors. Why not take that same technology we use in broadcast and other types of video areas and bring it to healthcare, we thought.”
Development of NUCLeUS is based on Sony’s imaging and AV/IT technologies, as well as the work of eSATURNUS, a Belgium-based company acquired by SONY in 2016 that provides clinical video-over-IP solutions within the medical field.

The fully scalable technology can be used with either copper or fiber IP networks, making it ideal for OR rooms or retrofits, and enabling it to be extended to other rooms or hospital buildings at any time. The system can capture and manage high-quality video and audio content in near real time for centralized storage. It’s virtually real-time transmission function is expected to help encourage more informed decision-making, while its easy-to-use central dashboard will streamline workflows in operating rooms and laboratories by providing quick access to relevant imaging data.

This workflow is only furthered with the use of smart applications such as rotation correction, along with improved image routing and viewing options that enhance the ease of completing surgical operations, from the planning state to post-operative patient reviews. It also provides enhanced training and education for students, as well as cost-effective networked medical image content management.

The modality-neutral platform supports image routing from diverse manufacturers and offers greater support for third-party applications through business APIs and other tools, while enabling simple, secure access from anywhere over a hospital’s IP network. In addition, IT managers are provided with a secure and encrypted way of ensuring remote and preventive solution maintenance, including self-monitoring capabilities.

“If you’re a small community hospital with two operating rooms, NUCLeUS is a great way to get into the integration space. You can buy different licenses and add some end coders or decoders to it. You can open up or keep it as small as you want. It’s not a big expense. If you’re NYU or Cornell where you may have 20-30 operating rooms, this system scales up really quickly and allows you the headroom to manage that space. It kind of answers the question for both small and large.”

The solution comes with secure HIS integration and is fully HL7/DICOM compatible. Users outside the U.S. include University Hospitals Leuven (UZ Leuven) in Belgium and Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden.

A release is expected to take place in December 2019.

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