Corporate Technology - Rolf Hellinger

Siemens Corporate Research
Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) in Princeton, New Jersey (USA)
is Siemens’ largest research center outside Europe. For more than
thirty years, leading organizations in the private and public sectors
have turned to SCR for its expertise in breaking down barriers to
innovation and delivering real business value. With more than 300
scientists, engineers, and technology experts, SCR is helping its
customers and strategic partners grow their businesses in the fields
of healthcare, automation, production, energy, industry, and
information and communications.
A Technology
Greenhouse
As communication has become more complex
and demanding, Siemens has brought
strong and trusted leadership as a solutions
provider to a broad range of industries. Today,
SCR serves as a “technology greenhouse” in
which new ideas are nurtured and existing technologies
and business processes are enhanced.
As a result, SCR partners have been able to harvest
and harness innovations to improve their
businesses, resulting in long-lasting benefits.
The medical sector is a case in point. For instance.
In order to learn more from diverse diagnostic
imaging techniques, SCR is developing a
variety of data analysis and fusion technologies.
However, research has been hampered by the
heterogeneity of the imaging environment
where, particularly when it comes to the transition
from animal models to human testing, formats,
data sizes and software are often worlds
apart. With this in mind, SCR researchers working
under a contract from the National Institutes
of Health’s Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid
program have developed XIP (Extensible Imaging
Platform), an open platform that, for the first
time, offers a standardized basis for analyzing
images from any source, be it cellular,
histopathological, preclinical, or radiological.
XIP is made possible by a new plug-in architecture
that allows thousands of software modules
to be pieced together. This supports breakthrough
multi-resolution imaging technology
developed and patented by Siemens, which
makes it possible to integrate and correlate in
vitro microscopic and in vivo macroscopic imaging
data.
22 Corporate Technology
SCR researchers are also working with experts
from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
Maryland to develop software that will
help cardiologists and radiologists pinpoint and
treat myocardial infarctions. Using a new user
interface developed by SCR, the researchers succeeded
in combining real-time images generated
from a specially-designed MR catheter —
while the catheter was being guided toward a
patient’s heart — with three-dimensional MR
images of the patient’ s upper body. Once in the
heart, the catheter could be used to direct therapy
in areas near a myocardial infarction since
dead cells take up a contrast agent and therefore
appear bright in MR images. In this way, doctors
can precisely detect the location of a myocardial
infarction.
State-of-the-art medical technology is also
needed for the diagnosis of lung cancer. This
type of cancer, which is the number one cancer
killer worldwide, can be very difficult to detect
because a single CT chest scan can result in more
than 1,000 cross-sectional images. Evaluating
these images places significant demands on radiologists’
ability to cope with their workloads,
which can involve some 40 scans per day.
In view of this, Siemens has launched syngo
Lung CAD (computer-aided detection), an automated
application for the localization of small
nodules in the lungs. The product can detect
nodules as small as three millimeters in size. Like
a spell checker in a word processing program,
syngo Lung CAD can sift through hundreds of
images and detect any structures that fit a specified
list of nodule characteristics.
Even the most practiced and knowledgeable
researchers can be at a disadvantage when analyzing
and predicting outcomes from massive
volumes of data — a situation that can reduce
the scientific merit of results even as time and
cost issues increase. With this in mind, SCR’s
bioinformatics team has come up with a new application
known as Interactive Knowledge Discovery
and Data Mining (iKDD), which identifies
patterns in huge, heterogeneous and complex
databases. The application will enable the pharmaceutical,
clinical research, agricultural, and
biodefense sectors to analyze huge volumes of
data stemming from different sources and to determine
hidden patterns in order to zero in on
probable outcomes and make actionable recommendations.
The ability to make sense of huge and heterogeneous
masses of data is also being applied to
the continuous monitoring of complex systems
such as gas turbines, medical equipment, and
entire power plants. SCR’s condition monitoring
team develops technologies, algorithms and
software solutions for sensor-based monitoring,
diagnostics, and early fault detection in large,
expensive systems where around-the-clock productivity
is essential. Condition monitoring can
help increase system availability and reliability
while significantly reducing downtime, the
chances of catastrophic failures, and enabling
more efficient maintenance management.
Siemens’ PowerMonitor technology, for instance,
has been successfully used for several
years to monitor a fleet of 250 gas turbines from
a control center in Orlando, Florida.