Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital find Aware's Compression Technology superior in image quality

Business Wire, Nov 21, 1994

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 21, 1994--Aware Inc. announced today the results of a study conducted by the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital that will enable telemedicine diagnosis to be a viable option for most hospitals.

Based on the preliminary evaluation of seven board-certified radiologists, Aware's AccuPress for Radiology compression software was judged to have no diagnostically significant image degradation up to compression ratios of 40:1 for chest radiographs and up to 30:1 for bone radiographs.

Aware's AccuPress for Radiology is currently being used by American Telemedicine International, a wholly owned subsidiary of Massachusetts General Hospital, to receive and transmit images from a hospital in Saudi Arabia. According to Dr. Mark Goldberg, Director of Teleradiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and principle author of the clinical evaluation of Aware's compression, "We have been using compression on a routine basis at a ratio of 20:1 for transmitting radiographs, CT, and MR images over conventional phone lines between Saudi Arabia and Boston. Aware's wavelet-based compression technology is superior to all other compression technologies that we have evaluated."

"Previously too costly, a communications link among medical facilities, both in the United States and abroad, is now enabled by our unique wavelet compression," said Howard L. Resnikoff, Founder and CEO of Aware. "We are working with healthcare organizations to adapt new technologies such as this to fit the communications needs of the medical community."

Compression is used in telemedicine to decrease the time and cost of image transmission and the requirements for image storage. Until the discovery of wavelets and the development of AccuPress for Radiology, however, there was no technique that could compress and decompress an image at a high enough ratio without losing valuable diagnostic data.

Added Goldberg, "Also important, AccuPress for Radiology allows us to use existing telecommunications infrastructures in remote or rural areas to transmit images. This means we can reach those places that are most in need of telemedicine services without isolating locations that have not benefited from advances in communications technology."

AccuPress for Radiology software is currently available for Sun-OS, Solaris and DOS operating systems, and will soon be released for Microsoft Windows.

Aware, Inc., based in Cambridge, Mass., provides bandwidth management solutions for digital media publishing, imaging systems, and broadband communications, including bandwidth efficient solutions for ADSL, and telephony over fiber/coax networks.

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Throughout this release, numerous hardware and software products are mentioned by name. In most, if not all cases, these products names are claimed as trademarks by the companies that manufacture the products. It is not our intention to claim these names or trademarks as our own.

Note to Editors: To receive a reprint of the evaluation as it appeared in the American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR) or image reprints, please contact Sylvia Phillips at Aware Inc. 617/577-1700.

CONTACT: Aware Inc., Cambridge

Sylvia Phillips, 617/577-1700

KEYWORDS: MASSACHUSETTS

INDUSTRY KEYWORD: COMED COMPUTERS/ELECTRONICS MEDICINE REPEATS: New York 212-575-8822 or 800-221-2462; Boston 617-330-5311 or

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