Today, where everything from grocery shopping to communicating with one's grandchildren seems to involve computers, it may be surprising to learn that the majority of medical facilities around the world have yet to embrace the use of computers for information management. Our medical records are stored on paper, and the associated medical images are stored on film. While film has traditionally been able to provide higher resolution images at lower costs, this advantage is diminishing quickly. As more and more physicians begin to be connected to the net via desktop PCs, there is a growing demand to use these PCs to do their work: to view images remotely, to perform online collaboration, to do image processing, and to store images such that they are readily available in the future.
In this talk, I shall describe Stentor's products for the digital storage, transmission, and display of medical images. I shall provide an overview of the traditional barriers to using computers for medical image management, and discuss how our iSyntax technology enables us to overcome these barriers.
About the speaker:
Rhea Tombropoulos received an A.B. in Computer Science and Psychology from Harvard College in 1990. After a short venture at Oracle Corporation, she entered Stanford University as a graduate student in Medical Informatics. Her doctoral research focused on treatment-planning algorithms for a robotic radiosurgical system; this research represented a combined effort between the Computer Science Department and the Department of Neurosurgery. After completing her Ph.D. in 1997, Dr. Tombropoulos implemented a system for image-guided surgery as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford. In November of 1997, she joined the medical marketing group at Silicon Graphics, Inc., where she worked on applications of Silicon Graphics technology to problems in medical imaging. Since June of 2000, Dr. Tombropoulos has worked at Stentor, Inc. as a software engineer developing medical imaging applications.
Contact information:
Rhea Tombropoulos
Stentor, Inc.
385 Oyster Point Blvd., Suite 8B
South San Francisco, CA 94080
650-228-1544
650-866-4197
rhea@stentor.com