Medical imaging firm Heart Imaging Technologies has received a $2.5 million National Institutes of Health grant to develop cloud-based services for cardiovascular imaging laboratories.
The goal is to build a “core lab of the future” that can integrate medical images from these labs with the electronic data capture systems used in managing clinical trial data. Durham-based HeartIT has already done work in the clinical trials market. Dr. Robert M. Judd, president of HeartIT, said that moving imaging core labs from brick and mortar locations and into the cloud will enable the medical images to be viewed and interpreted from anywhere in the world within minutes, rather than weeks.
“Moving core labs to ‘the cloud’ will not only improve core lab workflows, but will also improve communication between the core lab and the other clinical trials stakeholders such as the CRO (contract research organization), the data safety and monitoring board (DSMB), the sponsor, and the FDA,” Judd said in a statement. “In addition, making images available rapidly will enable new trial designs that reduce site-to-site variability of the study population, thereby reducing the number of patients needed to detect treatment effects, trial durations, and trial costs.”
