The Client

The client is an integrated medical systems manufacturer involved in every aspect of the medical equipment and medical information systems business, from R&D and manufacturing to sales and service. Headquarter is in Japan and other branches in American (USA), Europe (Switzerland) and Asia (China, Singapore). The company was established in 1949.

Business Needs

Recently, the technology of Computed Tomography Angiography (CT Angiography) which used dye (contrast) agent and based on the value of CT to diagnose the complication of blood vessels as stricture, infarction or dissociation are becoming increasingly popular. The blood vessel data (which has used contrast agent) will have the CT value at the same level as Bone data. Therefore, we can obtain a lot of valuable information for blood diagnosis. However, we only see the bone in the area where bone and blood located in each other in some cases causing difficulties in distinguishing and diagnosing. This application aims to distinguish Bone and contrasted blood vessel automatically from the data of CT images which have been scanned as Axial image of Head-Neck, Chest, Abdoment or Limb, so that technicians and doctors could easily observe the image of blood vessels only.
 
Main Features
  • Perform the Bone Removal processing automatically: Remove Bone data and ¬†extract data of Bone or Blood Vessel only
  • Modify the result of Bone Removal processing: Add, delete or exchange Bone and Blood Vessel data

Solutions

FPT Software used its Onsite-Offshore Model, a team was worked onsite to study the requirements and support for the offshore team. The application was built following FPT Software's process and Customer's process to assure the quality of a healthcare application. We tried some algorithms to find out the best algorithm for data processing (based on region growing algorithm). We also performed a review, optimize and refine code to get the expected performance. Memory leakage was a struggle which we have overcome: we used linked list for blocks of allocated memory to satisfy both of the requirement on performance and memory leakage issue.

Benefits

Though FPT Software faced several problems such as complexity of the processing and business, short duration, the requirement on performance and memory resource‚ it still managed to deliver considerable benefits, including:
  • The client trusted us on the capability to solve complicated technology.
  • The FPT Software team created and delivered a high-quality product at a reasonable cost. Thanks to the offshore-based sustenance model that the team put in place, the client's Total Cost of Operations (TCO) was dramatically reduced.

Project Summary

Scope:
  • Create ADD and DDD
  • Coding and Performing test and capture evident for CTC, the important case of UTC
  • Support UAT
Out of scope:
  • The error of A3D system which is not relevant to Bone Removal
  • The main algorithm which has been used in Part-Recognition and Bone Removal
Objective
  • This application is for healthcare, so our objective is to deliver the application with the best quality and to increase productivity (292->360)
Leakage: 0.18 WDeft/UCP + Correction cost: 6.0% + Productivity: 360 LOC/MM (development only) 

Technologies Used

Delphi 6.0, SVN, Knowledge of CT and image data processing

Other Applications for CT Device

Within 15 months, we have successfully developed 9 CAD applications for this client to display and analyze CT images including:
  • Perfusion Analysis
  • Calcium Scoring
  • Coronary Analysis
  • Dental Analysis
  • Abdomen Analysis
  • Lung Analysis
  • Osteo Pointer
  • Bone Removal
  • Muscle/Fat Pointer
The system received the Good Design Award in 2010 and TEPIA Award.