A new ultrasound system has been designed to enable hospitals and healthcare clinics to handle the demands of increasing patient volumes and cost pressures.

Presented at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress 2014 in Barcelona in September 2014, Affiniti, developed by Philips Healthcare (Best, The Netherlands), provides the technology to help radiology/ultrasound departments to help more patients with fewer resources and deliver high quality patient care.

“Affiniti was designed with the everyday challenges of healthcare professionals in mind,” said Vitor Rocha, CEO and senior vice president of ultrasound for Philips imaging systems. “We have leveraged more than 45 years of ultrasound innovation to deliver a reliable system that combines the excellent image quality our customers expect for fast, confident diagnosis, with advanced tools to help them improve efficiency and workflow and allow for the very best standard of care.”

Built on the same architecture as Philips’ cutting-edge EPIQ ultrasound, Affiniti meets the needs of clinicians who are confronted with treating large volumes of patients daily. Philips collaborated with hundreds of physicians worldwide, who provided feedback to help inform Affiniti’s ergonomic design, which led to an intuitive, easy-to-use system. Philips put the system through 4,500 hours of reliability testing with the demands of a busy medical practice and heavy workload in mind.

“With our high patient volume, cost pressures, and throughput demands, my department/clinic/facility needs a system that offers high performance, a range of configuration options and low total cost of ownership while still offering superior image quality,” said Dr. Martin Penicka, cardiologist at the Cardiovascular Center Aalst, OLV Clinic (Belgium). “Philips Affiniti enables us to get to the level of detail we need to best serve our patients and enable our clinicians to keep up with increasing demand.”

The features of the new system include precise, clear images that enable fast, effective diagnosis to lessen the need for additional exams; Philips’ PureWave transducer technology, which provides excellent image quality with little or no need for image adjustment for technically difficult patients; anatomic intelligent ultrasound, providing automatic anatomy recognition and quantification, making it easy to perform exams and rapidly deliver new levels of clinical information; automation tools such as AutoSCAN, Auto Doppler, and SmartExam to reduce the number of steps required to complete each exam, resulting in enhanced workflow; and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and personal computer (PC) format capabilities to allow streamlined information-sharing.

Affiniti but will be available in several European markets later this year, with the US launch expected in 2015. The system is not yet CE marked or available for delivery in the European Union (EU).

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