SimonMed, Cox team on mammography technology

September 6, 2011 – bizjournals.com – Original Source

« Back to News

---

When SimonMed Imaging Inc. invested more than $500,000 in a 3–D mammogram earlier this year, the Scottsdale company didn’t have the broadband width to handle the new technology.

The outpatient imaging provider turned to Cox Business Arizona to increase its bandwidth, said Gregg Barker, director of development for SimonMed. To make the new technology available on an outpatient basis, Cox Business installed multiple fiber rings to connect SimonMed’s 29 offices to its data center hub.

The new mammogram technology is called tomosynthesis and is considered the next generation of digital mammography that produces three-dimensional images of breast tissue, said Dr. John Simon, founder of SimonMed. This enhanced imaging allows radiologists to see multisliced pictures to help increase diagnostic accuracy in breast cancer detection with faster results for patients. Plus, this more accurate process reduces anxiety for patients because there is less need for additional scans, he said.

Hyman Sukiennik, vice president of Cox Business, said his company provided SimonMed with scalability so that if one office needs more or less bandwidth for its operations, Cox can adjust the network without any disruption to SimonMed.

“Our ability to deploy fiber across the marketplace is going to allow us to bring higher levels of technology and bandwidth to the clinic environment – to private doctors’ offices,” Sukiennik said. “But actually, we’re taking it one step further. We’re engineering high-capacity solutions to the homes of radiologists so they can read at home and late at night and on weekends.”

These will be the networks of the future for physician practices looking to expand, Sukiennik said.

Before founding SimonMed in 2003, Simon had been a radiologist at Scottsdale Medical Imaging for 13 years. SimonMed has 700 employees, including 38 radiologists.

Dr. Christopher May, a radiologist at SMIL, said the 3D mammogram equipment also is part of SMIL’s clinical practice.

SMIL was part of the large multi-institutional research study that validated the technology’s effectiveness before it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for general use in February.

“We now have a couple of years and hundreds of cases of prior experience, and expect it to form an important part of our practice going forward,” May said. “We are optimistic that it will increase sensitivity for detecting subtle changes of early cancer, as well as improving specificity for things that are not, in fact, cancerous. This will mean fewer false alarms and fewer additional follow-up studies.”