TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

 

Some of the statements made under the headings “Business” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K contain forward-looking statements which reflect our plans, beliefs and current views with respect to, among other things, future events and financial performance. We often identify these forward-looking statements by the use of forward-looking words such as “believe”, “expect”, “potential”, “continue”, “may”, “will”, “should”, “could”, “would”, “seek”, “predict”, “intend”, “plan”, “estimate”, “anticipate” or the negative version of those words or other comparable words. Any forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report are based upon our historical performance and on current plans, estimates and expectations. The inclusion of this forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by us or any other person that the future plans, estimates or expectations contemplated by us will be achieved. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties. In addition, there are or will be important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those indicated in these statements. We believe these factors include, but are not limited to, those described in Item 1A of this Annual Report under the caption “Risk Factors”.

 

These cautionary statements should not be construed as exhaustive and should be read in conjunction with the other cautionary statements that are included in this Annual Report. Moreover, we operate in a continually changing business environment, and new risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time. Management cannot predict these new risks or uncertainties, nor can it assess the impact, if any, that any such risks or uncertainties may have on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ from those projected in any forward-looking statement. Accordingly, the risks and uncertainties to which we are subject can be expected to change over time, and we undertake no obligation to update publicly or review the risks or uncertainties described herein. We also undertake no obligation to update publicly or review any of the forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise.

 

Overview

 

We provide enterprise-level information technology solutions for the clinical analysis and management of digital medical images within health care provider organizations. Our solutions consist of advanced visualization and image management software for multiple medical specialties, comprehensive knowledge tools for cardiology, support services and third-party components. Our web-enabled advanced visualization software provides physicians across the enterprise — in multiple medical specialties and at any network access point — with tools to manipulate and analyze images in two dimensions (“2D”) and three dimensions (“3D”). We enable physicians to better understand internal anatomic structure and pathology, which can improve clinical diagnoses, disease screening and therapy planning. We believe our solutions improve physician productivity and patient care, enhance customer revenue opportunities, automate complex, mission-critical medical imaging workflow, and maximize our customers’ return on investment in capital equipment and clinical information systems.

 

We sell to multi-hospital networks, community hospitals, physician clinics and diagnostic imaging centers. Health care providers produce growing volumes of medical imaging data that must be analyzed, managed and stored efficiently and cost-effectively. We focus on developing corporate-level relationships with large multi-facility organizations, which can result in substantial cross-selling opportunities and represent an important competitive advantage for us. Since our first commercial implementation in December 2000, we have implemented our solutions at facilities affiliated with some of the largest multi-facility health care providers in the U.S.

 

As of December 31, 2005, we had $158.0 million in contracted backlog, consisting primarily of fees for contracted future installations and for the support of existing installations, compared with a contracted backlog of $118.2 million at December 31, 2004. We expect to recognize revenue of approximately $73.3 million from

our current contracted backlog during fiscal year 2006, $27.0 million during fiscal year 2007, and substantially all of the approximately $57.7 million remaining by 2010.

 

We were founded in December 1998 as an Alabama corporation and reincorporated in Delaware in January 2000. On February 14, 2005, we completed our initial public offering. We acquired Camtronics Medical Systems, Ltd. (Camtronics) on November 1, 2005.

 

Our Opportunity

 

Demand for advanced visualization and image management solutions is growing as the number and size of imaging exams increase due to accelerating physician adoption of advanced imaging, the growing health care needs of an aging U.S. population and the increasing sophistication of imaging devices such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET) and cardiac catheterization. We do not believe existing film-based workflow or department-level Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) are sufficient to meet this growing demand. Health care providers need digital infrastructure, storage and image management capabilities to alleviate the operating strain created by medical image records.

 

Frost & Sullivan, a leading health care consulting and research firm, estimated in a 2004 report that the total U.S. medical imaging market, including capital equipment and technology, would reach $16.6 billion in 2008. They report that information technology spending associated with medical imaging accounted for approximately 15% of the total medical imaging market in 2003 and estimate that it will grow at an average compound annual growth rate of 15% from 2002 through 2008. Further, in 2005 Frost & Sullivan forecasted a 16.8% compound annual growth rate in enterprise cardiology PACS from 2004 through 2011.

 

We believe the rapid expansion in the number and complexity of medical images and the need to automate complex, manual workflow processes are driving health care providers to invest in systems that maximize their return on capital investments in expensive imaging devices and clinical information technology. We facilitate the convergence of imaging technology and clinical automation at the enterprise level by enhancing analysis, integration and automation of medical imaging data. Effective image management can shorten report turnaround times, lower the potential for manual error in data entry and filing, increase staff efficiency, eliminate costs associated with traditional radiological workflow and improve overall diagnostic and clinical quality. We believe the following factors have collectively increased the demand for our solution:

 

Increasing Number, Size and Complexity of Imaging Exams.  The number of imaging exams performed each year is increasing as a result of a number of factors, including increased physician use of advanced imaging as a non-invasive diagnostic and clinical tool, lowered costs of imaging devices and increased health care needs of an aging U.S. population. At the same time, technological advancements are increasing the size and complexity of individual imaging exams. For example, new CT scanners produce 20 times as much data as prior models, with exams consisting of thousands of individual images yielding 500 to 1,000 megabytes of data per exam, versus only 25 to 50 megabytes just three years ago. One modality manufacturer has announced that they plan to have a 256-slice CT scanner on the market by 2008, and that scanner will produce images that are at least ten times the size of the images produced by today’s most advanced scanners. The increasing prevalence of fusion techniques used to combine images from multiple imaging devices increases the complexity of many exams. The rapid growth in the data size of medical images means that medical images also consume a greater share of hospital resources.

 

Need for Advanced Visualization Tools.  Because the output of a cross-sectional imaging device, such as a CT scanner, may consist of thousands of “sliced” 2D images, physicians need sophisticated software tools to model those images in 3D and allow the viewing of a “virtual” patient at all angles. Physicians can benefit from computer-created 3D images and eliminate the need to mentally reconstruct 2D images into a single useful 3D image. This improves diagnostic capabilities, treatment and non-invasive surgical planning. Sophisticated new tools, such as 3D volumetric imaging and volume rendering, maximum intensity projection (MIP), multi-planar reformat (MPR) and surface shading, are increasingly essential to present medical images in a manner that is valuable to the physician for diagnosis and treatment planning. Moreover, some surgical specialists will not perform a complex surgery without first

performing pre-operative 3D planning. Hospitals and hospital networks that provide these advanced visualization tools to physicians have the advantage of attracting patient referrals from those physicians that heavily utilize visualization technology in their practices.

 

Need for Complete Electronic Health Records.  The need to improve clinical care and eliminate inefficiencies in existing paper-based methods, including film-based image management, continues to drive investment in clinical information technology. In 2004, the federal government began several initiatives to accelerate information technology adoption rates within the health care system, including the Presidential appointment of a national health care information technology office and a recommitment to the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee. Health care providers are implementing clinical information systems to automate clinical documentation and integrate patient information into electronic health records. However, these clinical information systems typically lack the sophistication or capability to incorporate digital medical images from radiology modalities, echocardiology, or the cardiac catheterization lab into patient health records. Incomplete electronic health records can result in delayed diagnosis, billing errors and inefficient workflow. A complete electronic health record, which includes all medical images and complete data from cardiac catheterization and echocardiology procedures, enhances the benefits of investment in clinical information technology.

 

Shortcomings of Film-Based Image Management.  Many health care providers still use film to capture medical images from devices such as X-ray machines, which may produce three to four images per typical exam, and CT scanners, which can produce 1,000 images per exam. A film-based system has numerous inefficiencies, including complex exam scheduling, redundant patient data entry, the possibility of misplaced or misfiled notations and case histories, physical films and files that must be copied often or moved among the technologist, the specialist physician and the treating physician, and substantial storage space requirements. Each of these inefficiencies has the potential to increase the total cost per exam.

 

Limitations of Current Methodologies for Managing Digital Medical Images.  Current digital medical image management systems, which correct some of the inefficiencies of film-based imaging, have traditionally consisted of specialized services and technologies tied to specific department-level requirements. For example, a typical PACS installation is a department-level installation with dedicated hardware components primarily designed to address the image storage and distribution needs of a small number of physicians in a single department (e.g., radiology or cardiology, but not both). While PACS may offer substantial automation benefits within such a single department over traditional film-based imaging workflow, they do not offer the full potential of an integrated, enterprise-level digital image management solution and these systems also typically do not integrate with clinical and administrative systems without expensive custom programming. Many hospitals that have embraced image automation have had to purchase multiple PACS and software tools for various departments and imaging devices, which presents integration challenges and requires significant investment. Many PACS were developed prior to the recent growth in the use of 3D imaging techniques and do not easily scale to handle the data volume of current imaging devices. PACS visualization tools are typically limited only to 2D and are not distributable across the network except in a very rudimentary manner.

Our Solutions

 

We provide enterprise-level information technology solutions for the clinical analysis and management of digital medical images within health care provider organizations.

 

 

 

With our solutions, our customers and their constituents, including physicians, technologists and nurses, can improve overall clinical and diagnostic quality and eliminate much of the labor and other costs of dealing with film, disparate department-level information systems, exam scheduling and redundant data entry. We also help to alleviate heavy burdens on a health care provider’s staff by automating medical image workflow for physicians and technologists. We believe our enterprise visual medical system (EVMS) solution provides the benefits of current department-level PACS, including increased automation and better efficiency over traditional film-based methods, with added enterprise-level connectivity and advanced visualization tools that are not available with a typical PACS installation.

 

We have designed our solutions to offer benefits to the following groups:

 

Our solutions offer the following:

 

Single-Source, Enterprise-Level Image Management.  Our solutions provide a single data repository for medical images created by digital imaging devices and related patient data across a single or multi-facility enterprise, whether from radiology, cardiology, pathology, orthopedics, obstetrics, gynecology or other departments. This single repository serves as a central point of workflow and content management for those images. Our solutions catalog, archive and route these images through our software, combining centralized control over sensitive patient imaging records with increased availability to physicians and other authorized users, in multiple medical specialties and at any network access point. Our solutions integrate with our customers’ existing clinical information and administrative systems, serving as the patient’s visual medical record repository, reducing the risk of billing errors and lowering the average cost per exam through automation of complex and manual film-based imaging workflow.

 

Advanced Visualization Technology.  Our solutions quickly deliver web-enabled software toolsets and images to physicians throughout the enterprise for diagnostic analysis and treatment planning. Our advanced visualization software allows physicians to create 2D and 3D views of human anatomy based on the output of imaging devices and to manipulate, navigate within and compare imaging exams in order to better visualize and understand internal anatomic structure and pathology. Improvements in the visualization of medical images can lead to improved clinical diagnosis, disease screening and treatment planning by physicians. Physicians can access our advanced visualization software from any network access point, including home, office or throughout the health care facility. Our intelligent user interface automatically adjusts for the specialty of each physician, the preferences of each user, the type of imaging device used to create the image, and the particular body part and tissue type being examined.

 

Specialty-Specific Clinical Applications.  With our acquisition of Camtronics in November, 2005, we added a full suite of products to enhance capabilities of specialists in the cardiology department. These solutions manage images and clinical data relating to cardiac catheterization, echocardiography, nuclear cardiography, vascular ultrasound, and hemodynamics. We are focused on the development of enhancements and additional functionality to our existing advanced visualization software to further meet the clinical needs of other clinical specialties, including emergency medicine, orthopedics, oncology, pathology, obstetrics, gynecology, and neurology.

 

Open Standards-Based Software.  We believe that our use of open standards has enabled us to design software that stores and manages information faster and with fewer hardware resources than competitive systems, a benefit we believe is becoming increasingly important as the data size of many imaging exams grows. We have designed our software to make full use of the DICOM standard for medical image data. We believe our commitment to open standards, such as DICOM and the standard protocol for the storage of text-based patient information, Health Level 7 (HL7), means that our software will be compatible with new imaging device technologies and other clinical information systems that conform to these standards. We lower our customers’ total costs by eliminating the need for translation to and from non-standard or proprietary communication methods which often require the purchase of additional hardware and software.

 

Effective Implementation, User Adoption and Support Services.  We focus on delivering effective implementation, user adoption and support services as an integral part of our solution. During the implementation phase of our solution, we use proven project management principles, including change management and adult learning techniques, to facilitate rapid and complete adoption by our customer. After implementation, we monitor system and user behaviors and, when appropriate, intervene to make the adjustments we consider necessary to prevent anticipated problems from occurring. Additionally, we use tools that measure the ultimate success of our customers’ implementation, including providing reports on productivity, operating performance and return on investment. We believe our focus on implementation and support services ensures that our customers’ investments in our solutions are well managed and achieve the customers’ financial and operational objectives.

Our Strategy

 

Our goal is to become the industry leader in enterprise-level information technology solutions for the clinical analysis and management of digital medical images. Key elements of our strategy include:

 

Expand Our Market Share by Attracting New Customers.  We believe a full range of health care organizations, from stand-alone imaging centers to multi-site hospital systems, represent a largely underserved market for our solution. Our current base of installed facilities represents a small portion of the prospective customers for our solution. We are expanding our sales and marketing efforts so that we may pursue new customers. As we pursue new customers, we intend to continue focusing our efforts on the large, multi-site health care providers that typically recognize the greatest benefits and fastest return on an investment in our solution and represent the largest individual sales opportunities. We believe our position as a sole source provider of an advanced visualization and image management solution, together with our implementation expertise and our installed base of nationally recognized reference customers will help us attract new customers.

 

Increase Penetration With Existing Customers.  We believe that using our successful relationships with existing multi-facility health care customers to expand our penetration within those organizations and selling additional functionality to our existing installed base are effective ways to increase our operating margins by reducing the average cost of sales and increasing the total revenue from existing customers.

 

 

Enhance Our Product Offerings.  We believe developing or acquiring additional functionality for our existing software, including improved advanced visualization products for multiple specialties, such as emergency medicine, orthopedics, oncology, pathology, neurology, obstetrics, and gynecology will further strengthen our position in the market. Further enhancements to our advanced visualization software and our suite of cardiology products should assist us in selling our solution to multi-hospital systems and expanding our existing customer relationships. We also plan to invest further in workflow and integration software to speed integration with existing clinical information systems, including electronic health record systems.

 

Continue to Deliver Superior Implementation, User Adoption and Customer Support Services.  As a single-source provider of advanced visualization and image management solutions, we believe the quality of our implementation, user adoption and support services helps to differentiate us from our competition. We have designed our systems, services and pricing strategies around this belief. We expect to continue to invest in, refine and develop new services to provide our customers with the highest level of services available and to provide us with a base of recurring revenue. We believe delivering superior services will

enable us to capture increased market share and enhance our existing customer relationships, thereby increasing our competitiveness.

 

Maintain Our Open-Standards Focus.  We believe our commitment to open standards, such as DICOM and HL7, lowers our development costs, accelerates our time to market, lowers our customers’ total cost of ownership, improves speed and quality of our solution’s integration and differentiates us from our competition. By designing our solution around open standards, we believe we maximize our solution’s integration with our customers’ existing clinical information technology systems and imaging devices, which reduces our customers’ total cost of ownership. We also believe our open-standards model lowers the hardware costs associated with implementing our solution because it enables our customers to use relatively inexpensive, off-the-shelf hardware to visualize, analyze and manipulate images. We plan to continue this commitment, which we believe enables our customers to maximize their return on investment in both current and future imaging devices, computer hardware and clinical information technology systems.

 

Our Product and Service Offerings

 

We provide an enterprise-level information technology solution for the clinical analysis and management of digital medical images within health care provider organizations. Our solution consists of advanced visualization and image management software, comprehensive support services and third-party components.

 

Software

 

EVMS includes three principal software components: advanced visualization tools, clinical content management and clinical workflow through a dynamic user interface.

 

Advanced Visualization Tools consist of our suite of software tools for the advanced visualization and analysis of digital medical images by physicians and medical professionals. Components include graphics and image processing modules that present information to physicians and medical professionals using relevant multi-specialty tools through a dynamic user interface. Physicians can manipulate 2D and 3D image-related content in a variety of ways including organization, rotation, inversion, magnification and enhancement of images in a collaborative environment for sharing findings with other physicians or medical professionals. These tools help physicians better visualize and understand internal anatomic structure and pathology. Additional benefits include:

 

 

Clinical Content Management is our image archival and distribution management software. Clinical Content Management supports the DICOM standard for digital medical images enabling a high level of scalability that facilitates fast, efficient access to storage and retrieval of such images in enterprise applications.

The system includes auto-routing and predictive capabilities that improve workflow in a clinical environment by performing time intensive tasks in anticipation of their need, thereby minimizing network traffic and facilitating responsiveness across the enterprise.

 

Clinical Content Management employs a distributed architecture that enables administrative changes without the need to shut down the system, minimizes system memory requirements, increases the speed of access to images through a relational database and provides customized reporting capabilities. In a distributed multi-hospital environment, the system also manages local “caches” at remote sites, which provide local image acquisition and temporary storage for rapid retrieval. Permanent image data is simultaneously stored at the centralized long-term archive. Each remote cache also acts as a proxy server to provide a view of images throughout the enterprise, no matter where the image was originally generated. The use of a local cache ensures that no individual facility is dependent on the wide-area network for the sourcing of locally created images.

 

Additional benefits include:

 

 

Clinical Workflow is our standards-based software used to manage integration and data migration between our solution and other health information systems throughout the enterprise. We utilize a DICOM imaging device worklist, which automates technologist workflow, prioritizing and managing processes based on other systems such as admissions. In addition, Clinical Workflow includes tools that enable the integration of our solution with electronic health records and other information systems such as voice recognition. The benefits of the system include the rapid and systematic integration of the patient’s digital medical images with the rest of the enterprise’s clinical and administrative information systems without the need for custom programming, integration services, or third-party translation devices.

 

Our HeartSuite enterprise solutions for cardiology were added to our product offerings as a result of our acquisition of Camtronics on November 1, 2005. Our cardiology solutions include HeartSuite VERICIS, HeartSuite Hemodynamics and HeartSuite CVIS.

 

HeartSuite VERICIS creates a complete digital record of images and reports for patients in the cardiac catheterization lab, in echocardiography (including specialized applications for pediatric echocardiography), in vascular ultrasound and in nuclear cardiology. Like our EVMS solution, VERICIS is built to conform to DICOM and HL7 standards. Benefits include:

 

 

HeartSuite Hemodynamics is a comprehensive monitoring and data management system that integrates cardiac catheterization lab procedural information into the patient’s cardiac record. HeartSuite Hemodynamics provides functionality for data collection, real-time waveform analysis, inventory control, patient charging and procedure reporting in a single system. Benefits include the ability to mine data and create custom reports that aid in driving improvements in quality and efficiency.

 

HeartSuite CVIS is a web-based system designed to provide the cardiology department with all its information needs in one application. It summarizes the patient cardiovascular state and aggregates all clinical information in one location, tracks patient clinical trends and supports care planning. The system aids in workflow in the department of cardiology by scheduling labs and office encounters, tracking patients while they are in the hospital, capturing and aggregating cardiovascular billing codes. The information in the system is stored in a central database that provides cross-modality statistics for operational, administrative and other business needs.

 

Service and Support

 

We believe that our implementation, user adoption and support services differentiate us strategically from our competitors. Large-scale infrastructure information technology installations can present special challenges to an enterprise, regardless of its size or sophistication. We believe that IT projects often fail due to inadequate implementation and support services and believe that our service model better meets the installation and investment objectives of our customers.

 

Our “Customer Success Program” includes the following components:

 

 

We provide revenue mix analysis services, using data combined from hospital information systems and the enterprise’s imaging environment data, to understand and prioritize key equipment and physician revenue producers for a hospital. This analysis can provide critical data to hospital administrators for capital and technology investment planning initiatives. We also provide additional professional information technology services to our customers that have specific needs related to system integrations and interfaces and data migration.

Third-Party Components

 

Our solutions typically include the installation and implementation of platform components that we procure from third parties. We believe that providing third-party components helps us deliver a comprehensive solution that meets the needs of our customers. Some of the third-party components we provide include:

 

 

Our Technology

 

We believe the following technologies and strategies help us to compete more effectively:

 

IHE technical framework is a protocol for the integration of DICOM image information and HL7 text-based patient information. We believe our commitment to IHE helps to ensure that our software integrates seamlessly with HL7-based billing and patient record information systems implemented at our customer sites.

 

 

Customers

 

Our customers range in size from single imaging centers to large multi-facility healthcare networks. As of December 31, 2005, we had installed our EVMS solution in 139 hospitals or other health care facilities, 114 of which are members of multi-facility networks with which we have customer relationships. At December 31, 2005, we had implemented our advanced visualization solution in 66% of our current installed EVMS customer base. While this is a significant increase over the 45% of our installed base that used our advanced visualization software at December 31, 2004, we believe the additional hospitals that are currently using other visualization technology represent a growth opportunity for us. There are also over 300 hospitals where we have installed our HeartSuite solutions in their cardiology departments. Our customers include members of the following multi-facility networks with ten or more facilities: Allina Hospitals and Clinics, Ascension Health, Aurora Health Care, BJC Healthcare, Catholic Healthcare West, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, Sisters of Mercy Health Systems and Sisters of St. Francis Health Services.

 

Contracted implementations for Ascension Health constituted 33% of our contracted backlog as of December 31, 2005, compared to 35% as of December 31, 2004.

 

Sales and Marketing

 

We use a direct sales model, with sales representatives who have substantial experience in health care-related direct sales. Our sales representatives undergo rigorous training in our products as well as the needs of each constituent group within our potential customers. During our sales cycle for a typical customer we might, at various times, present to the Chief Information Officer, the Director of Radiology or Cardiology, the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Medical Officer, the Chief Operating Officer and the Chief Executive Officer. We also typically must present to several key physicians representing the specialties that are expected to use our system such as radiologists, cardiologists, emergency room physicians, neurosurgeons and orthopedists. Each of these constituencies may have different priorities and evaluation criteria, and our direct sales representatives must be capable of presenting a compelling business case to each.

 

Our sales representatives are supported by our sales support and marketing communications team, which provides technical, demonstration, lead generation, market development and proposal assistance.

 

Research and Development

 

As of December 31, 2005, we had 150 employees who are primarily dedicated to research and development activities. In addition to our employees, we also utilize contractors and consultants on a routine

basis to perform specified research and development activities. We also utilize clinical advisory boards and end-user focus groups that are organized by area of expertise to advise us on the clinical functionality of our solutions. We have focused our research and development mission on the continued evolution of intelligent, fault tolerant, highly scalable image management and visualization systems for mission-critical medical image management applications. We adhere to a philosophy of open standards-based solutions. We believe that we fulfill a critical technology and performance void in current generation departmental PACs systems. We further believe we have designed our visualization platform in a way that enables us to efficiently add new functionality. We are focusing our research and development efforts on:

 

 

We follow a formal product development process and employ dedicated product development personnel. Under our formal product development process, internal and external (customer) requests for added features or functionality are forwarded to our strategy and architecture team. This team evaluates and prioritizes these potential product enhancements taking into account expected costs, anticipated value to the customer, regulatory requirements, timing and resource availability. After our strategy and architecture team approves these enhancements, our engineering team develops them and subjects them to quality testing and documentation requirements before we make them generally available to our customers.

 

We invested $4.1 million, $6.0 million and $10.7 million for research and development in 2003, 2004 and 2005, respectively.

 

Competition

 

The markets for the digital medical image management and visualization systems that we offer are highly competitive. Many customers purchase products and services from us and from our competitors as well. We compete with companies that fall into four primary categories:

 

 

Many of our current and potential competitors have significantly greater name recognition and more established distribution networks and relationships with health care providers. To compete effectively, we often must persuade the prospective customer to separate its purchasing decisions with respect to imaging equipment from its purchasing decisions with respect to archival and visualization tools, because many of our competitors offer imaging devices that they package or bundle with licensed or owned image management applications.

 

Our ability to compete successfully will depend on a number of factors both within and outside our control, including:

 

 

 

Intellectual Property

 

We rely generally on a combination of trade secret and copyright law, employee and third-party nondisclosure agreements and other protective measures to protect intellectual property rights pertaining to all of our software technology. In addition, we have filed patent applications to protect certain aspects of our software technology. To date, one patent has been issued.

 

As filed in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, our patent applications generally relate to DICOM-type image transmission and, in particular, to methods and apparatus for streaming DICOM-type images via a network. In addition, we have also filed a patent application in the U.S. that generally relates to a method and system for storing, communicating and displaying image data. In particular, this application relates to methods and systems for storing image data on a server, communicating at least a portion of the image data from the server to a client via a network, and displaying images at the client using the communicated data.