January has been a month of change for Abbott, and a senior medical devices analyst from GlobalData asserts that the company’s latest cardiac diagnostics product represents the first step in a line of new diagnostic products that will act to deliver growth over the next few years.

An estimated 17 million people throughout the world die annually of cardiovascular diseases, specifically heart attacks or strokes. Time is a critical factor in diagnosing and treating people who may be having a potential heart attack. To aid physicians in detecting heart attacks sooner, Abbott announced CE marking for the Architect Stat High Sensitive Troponin-I Assay.

BRIT Systems announced new capabilities for their digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) routers that can pre-fetch studies from multiple servers and/or facilities based on select criteria that do not need to include the patient ID. The router morphs the patient ID in a pre-fetched study into the original or trigger ID, storing the pre-fetched IDs into alternate ID fields in both the database and the DICOM header. The new morphing router facilitates the creation of a single patient record and enables clinicians to view all studies on a single timeline. With this capability, clinicians will have access to a complete, cross-facility patient record that can be used to reduce unnecessary or duplicate imaging studies. The new capabilities were highlighted at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual meeting.