Medical scan iPhone application gets Health Canada approval

Comment on this story

Posted April 22, 2010

The new iPhone application will help doctors look at brain scans and other diagnostic imagesThink the iPhone is just a cool toy that keeps you connected to your friends and colleagues?  Think again.  Now it’s also a medical tool that allows doctors to look at brain scans and other diagnostic images, thanks to the work of Ross Mitchell, PhD, of the Faculty of Medicine. 

Mitchell and his students, working with his spinoff firm Calgary Scientific, have received Health Canada approval for their Resolution MD Mobile Software, which lets physicians view and manipulate remote medical images in high-resolution 3D on the iPhone 3G, allowing a quick diagnosis for the treatment of stroke, cardiac arrest or other emergencies.

“We really want to try to have a clinical impact if we can,” Mitchell says.  "We have a strong belief that it's not enough to see our work published in a scholarly journal. We actually want to see it translated to clinical impact.” The device is still undergoing clinical trials at Foothills Hospital, where Mitchell’s lab is based, along with the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., and a couple of American universities.

“We did a stroke trial ... and compared performance of radiologists reading on the iPhone to the standard clinical reading work station and the performance was identical,” said Mitchell. “They performed just as well in this tough diagnostic task.  That’s a really good indicator that this could be quite useful for diagnosing all sorts of things that aren’t as tough,” he added.

U of C oncology professor Dr. Jay Easaw said the new technology is exciting.

"We can be at home and let's say it's three in the morning and we get a call saying that a patient presented to the emergency department, an MRI scan has been done," he says. "We can call that up, take a look at it right from where we are and make a treatment decision immediately."

For now the technology is best suited for diagnosing brain diseases like cancer and stroke, according to Mitchell. But he hopes it will also be useful for illnesses such as breast and prostate cancer.  Mitchell says the software is currently being tested on the new iPad, which has a larger screen to view the images.

Mitchell also developed a new way to layer and analyze images — what he calls a "virtual biopsy." Several scans are grouped together to form a three-dimensional image, which can help track tumours, for example. But Mitchell says there will always be a need for physical biopsies.

"I see the virtual biopsy as being more complementary," he said. "I wouldn't hope that it would replace surgical biopsy because there's a lot of value in getting a piece of tissue."