SUN MICROSYSTEMS SPONSORS MEDICAL USERS GROUP Creates Forum for Technology Exchange MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. --July 25, 1989-- Sun Microsystems has formed a special interest group for users of Sun workstations in medical imaging and health information systems. Called SIGMA (Special Interest Group for Medical Applications), the group helps end users and OEMs of Sun workstations share information on their applications and research. In addition, select members of SIGMA will form a medical advisory panel to explore the future use of technology in healthcare. The first two-day SIGMA conference, held June 29-30 at Sun headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., attracted more than 100 attendees. Among them were faculty members from such institutions as the Mayo Clinic Foundation, Stanford University, Montreal Neurological Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, UCLA, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, the Cleveland Clinic and UCSF. Many of the top medical imaging OEMs, including GE Medical, Philips, Picker, Siemens, AT&T, ADAC, Acuson, EMTEK and Positron, also attended. SIGMA was created as an open forum in which to share experiences, applications and new directions for workstation technology, noted Ken Macrae, M.D., Ph.D., market segment manager for medical systems at Sun. "The changing economics of the medical industry necessitate a closer scrutiny of computer technology, which is what we hope SIGMA members will address," he said. "Healthcare is under increasing pressure to deliver higher quality care for lower cost. Computers -- like those from Sun -- that adhere to standards, can be networked together, and run user friendly software help solve that dilemma." The conference featured technology briefings on Sun's new SPARCstation TM 1 and SPARCstation 330 workstations, the TAAC-1 TM accelerator board, graphics products, windowing technology and SunVideo TM , a board that enables the display of true-color, full-motion video images. Sun President and CEO Scott McNealy spoke on the Sun perspective of computers in the 1990s. Also at SIGMA were presentations by medical professionals and researchers on several leading-edge applications currently running on Sun workstations. Among them: Montreal Neurological Institute Louis Collins and Chris Henri of the Montreal Neurological Institute are creating a 3-D atlas of the brain for use with MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and PET (positron emission tomography) images. Collins and Henri are able to overlay functional and anatomical data in 3-D to give a better indication of the relationship of the tumor or lesion to the rest of the anatomy for surgical planning. Other organizations such as the National Institute of Mental Health are hoping to use this technology for the diagnosis of Alzheimers Disease. Mayo Clinic Foundation Dr. Richard Robb and his team at Mayo Clinic created an application package for Sun workstations, Analyze, for image analysis, processing and reconstruction. Surgeons now use Analyze for surgical planning. For example, before surgeons performed extensive jaw reconstruction for a child who had had a serious accident, they were able to plan their strategy through image processing and analysis of CT images of the child's skull. Analyze has 60 routines that can be used to rotate, alter and measure medical images. Stanford University Several members of the Stanford University Radiology Department, led by Dr. Colleen Bergin and including Drs. Robert deLaPaz, James Sayre, John Drace and Craig Meyer, are researching the clinical uses of magnetic resonance and its applications on Sun workstations. In addition, Dr. Larry Fagan of Stanford's Medical Informatics Department is doing work on enhancing the clinic utility of speech recognition in healthcare. Speech recognition is used by doctors when they dictate directly into the Sun workstation initial or interval patient history, physical examinations or data for medical spreadsheets. Stanford has also done considerable work on Oncocin, an expert system that is a database of records essential to speech recognition and improving decision-making. Massachusetts General Dr. Justin Pearlman has designed a medical image processing software toolkit that runs on Sun-4 TM workstations and allows information to be pipelined from one routine to the next. For example, a user may process a 2-D data set, define the region of interest and create a 3-D volume. Dr. Pearlman is also conducting research in non-invasive measurement of shear stresses in the heart based on a method that uses magnetic resonance tags to show in detail how the heart is contracting quadrant by quadrant. Sun plans to host SIGMA twice yearly. The next SIGMA conference is scheduled for early 1990. For more information on SIGMA, please contact Claire Eurglunes at Sun Microsystems, (415) 336-5561. Sun Microsystems, Inc., headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., is a leading worldwide supplier of network-based distributed computing systems, including professional workstations, servers and UNIX operating system and productivity software. Press Contact: Carol Berryman - (415) 336-6409