Meeting Details for October 18, 2006

The October meeting of UsabilityNJ will be held on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at Siemens Corporate Research, in Princeton, NJ (click for directions). Social hour starting at 6:30 PM. Presentation starting at 7:00 PM.

Topic: Product Development of the CartoMerge® Image Integration Technology for Treating Complex Arrhythmias - A Case Study on "Technology Innovation & Usability"

Speaker: Chenyang Xu, Ph.D.

Please RSVP to rsvp [at] usabilitynj [dot] org if you plan to attend the meeting.

Talk Summary

The CartoMerge image integration system is a novel medical imaging technology that can effectively guide the catheter ablation treatment of complex heart arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythms) by merging the catheter with a highly detailed 3D heart model from computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) images, similarly to the fusing of map and GPS for car navigation. As a result, doctors can move the catheter more confidently and precisely to specific areas of the heart responsible for generating the arrhythmia, improving ablation success and lowering procedure related risks. This technology was jointly developed by Siemens and Biosense-Webster (a Johnson & Johnson company). Since its launch in May 2005, this product has been tremendously successful in both market penetration and revenue generation. In less than a year, it has been deployed in over 300 catheter labs world wide and treated hundreds of heart arrhythmia patients.

Since the inception of this product, we knew this product would require not only inventing completely new image guidance technology for catheter ablation but also introducing significant changes in doctor's routine clinical workflow, i.e., using 3D imaging for the first time in their treatment. Aside from the common challenges, faced also by many other novel technology developments, such as technology feasibility, stringent performance requirement, user workflow optimization, time-to-market, and so on, what I would like to share most with the audience is the most crucial factor, in my view, that made this product widely accepted by users and being financially highly successful.

This crucial factor can be summarized in his own words as:

"Novel technology development decision & process should seek to synchronize the pace of technology innovation with the pace of user workflow innovation".

Speaker Bios

Chenyang Xu, Ph.D.
Siemens Corporate Research
Dr. Xu received a B.S. degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1993 and M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in 1995 and 1999, respectively, from the Johns Hopkins University, in electrical and computer engineering.
From March 1999 to September 2000, Dr. Xu was a postdoctoral fellow and then an associate research scientist of both the Center for Imaging Science and the Center for Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology at the Johns Hopkins University. Since September 2000, he has been with Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton and is currently a project manager in the interventional imaging program. He is a senior member of IEEE and has served on review committees for both international journals and conferences.
His main professional achievements include authoring the widely cited journal paper Snakes, Shapes, and Gradient Vector Flow (PDF document) published on the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing in 1998, and leading the team that developed the first commercial 3D image-guided technology in the world for catheter ablation procedure in treating complex heart arrhythmias. Since its launch in May 2005, the product has been deployed over 300 cardiac catheter labs around the world with hundreds of patients treated.

Downloads

Product Development of the CARTOMERGE Image Integration Technology for Treating Complex Arrythmias - A Case Study on "Technology Innovation & Usability" ( PDF, 1.6MB)

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