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Frank Ruttens, Key Account ManagerFrank Ruttens, the chief account manager of Agfa-labs, recalls this partnership as a rather unusual one. In his words, Agfa-labs tackled a situation that is “completely out of the scope of its daily business.” He says, “This is not our core business, but the science is so generic that we already had all the necessary equipment in our lab to accomplish this task.”
While this particular engagement was a new experience for Agfa-labs, the true essence of Agfa-Labs’ business process lies in materials research at the Material Technology Centre of its parent organisation, Agfa. With more than 140 well-trained and experienced scientists, up-to-date instrumentation infrastructure, 3000 square meters of chemical labs, 3600 square meters of distinct analytical labs and digital printing and coating labs, Agfa-labs offers a state-of-art research facility for analytical and development services.
One major breakthrough for the company is its ability to monitor the colloidal stability of suspensions and emulsions in its well-equipped lab.
With this approach, Agfa-Labs mitigates any shortcomings and imperfections of pharmaceutical or cosmetic products that might show up as a lack of stability (sedimentation, creaming, or phase separation), discolouration, bad odour, or allergic reaction to the human body. Moreover, Agfa-labs leverages its extensive domain knowledge in rheology, tensiometry, particle characterization, and sedimentometry for decoding chemical composition of ingredients of medicines and cosmetic products.
We have developed methodologies that reveal the underlying processes of adsorption/desorption, solubility, and particle-particle interactions
Ruttens comments, “To this extent, we have developed methodologies that reveal the underlying processes of adsorption/desorption, solubility, and particle-particle interactions.” For example, Agfa-Labs uses Hansen Solubility Parameters to optimize interfacial interactions between compounds in a composition. Practical applications of this approach include testing solvency of cleaning products and uptake of creams by the human skin, in addition to offering resistance to chemical attack by solvents and increasing the shelf life of a suspension, among others. In parallel to its other material testing methods, Agfa-labs’ high-throughput formulation techniques allow clients to unravel the composition of an existing benchmark and reduce time-to-market for the development of new products.
Last year, Agfa-labs expanded its distillation techniques to a higher level of precision. According to Ruttens, the new, improved separation technique can be used at wastewater treatment plants to isolate any catalyst or critical molecule present in the wastewater for their reuse in laboratories.
Looking at the road ahead, Agfa-labs is now planning to expand its services in the domain of ad-hoc services. As a multitude of new pharmaceutical and cosmetic projects are being created, the organization has started to share its experience and knowledge with its clients to direct the projects to maximize ROI. Ruttens notes that with the combined effort of Agfa-labs and its clients—pharmaceutical companies and cosmetic manufacturers—can make a stronger impact with their project than they can make alone.
Company
Agfa-Labs
Management
Frank Ruttens, Key Account Manager
Description
Core Life Analytics provides life scientists the access to powerful and easy to use web-based data analytics tools, allowing them to rapidly and independently, mine their high content and high throughput data. They offer a secure cloud-deployed application that will enable biologists to mine data sets rapidly. The company is also developing an online application for analysis of dose-response data. Their products help the customers leverage the power of cloud computing to independently analyze their own complex data sets, thus cutting the data-to-knowledge time
• Lunit to showcase poster presentation on Lunit INSIGHT CXR at ECR 2023 as part of 6 presentations
SEOUL, South Korea - Agfa Radiology Solutions announced the integration of Lunit's AI solution for chest radiology, Lunit INSIGHT CXR, in the MUSICA® Workstation. Agfa will showcase a demonstration of the integrated product at the upcoming European Congress of Radiology (ECR) 2023, to be held in Vienna, Austria, on March 1-5.
Lunit INSIGHT CXR detects suspicious lesions in chest x-ray images, helping radiologists distinguish disease areas by providing the location of the lesion with an abnormality score that reflects the AI's confidence level. The AI solution can detect 10 of the most common chest abnormalities, including tuberculosis, with 97-99% accuracy.[1]
The new critical findings workflow for clinicians by Lunit and Agfa provides automatic notifications to radiographers when a critical, life-threatening disease is detected, such as pneumothorax, pleural effusion, and pneumoperitoneum. Thus, hospitals can improve patient safety through timely communication with clinicians, especially in outpatient settings where patients return home after x-ray exams.
Agfa's MUSICA® workstation is an image processing software that offers a single intuitive interface covering general radiography, fluoroscopy, mammography, and full leg/full spine (FLFS). Lunit INSIGHT CXR's integration is the first in a range of new functionalities to be embedded in the MUSICA® Workstation to assist clinicians and radiologists with pathology detection.
"With the integration of Lunit INSIGHT CXR, we are continuing to deliver on our vision to transform digital radiology," said Paul Danini, Global Software Marketing and Product Manager at Agfa. "Lunit has a strong clinical validation track record and is registered in Europe and also more than 19 countries outside Europe, making it an excellent partner for developing solutions that bring our customers intelligent and definitive answers to their daily needs."
"We are thrilled to team with Agfa once again to create clinical value through AI and ensure a healthier life for patients," said Brandon Suh, CEO of Lunit. "We believe that the integration of Lunit's AI in Agfa's advanced medical imaging workstation will help facilitate more effective clinical workflows in various hospital situations."
The integrated solution will be publicly demonstrated for the first time at Agfa's booth #207.
Lunit also announced that it will showcase a poster presentation highlighting Lunit INSIGHT CXR's ability to differentiate between normal and abnormal chest radiographs—one of 6 presentations Lunit will be delivering at ECR 2023.
The study aimed to automate the detection of normal vs. abnormal chest radiographs—thus removing them from radiologists' worklist. Lunit INSIGHT CXR was used to retrospectively analyze 1,671 x-ray images from two large hospitals in the Netherlands. The data were collected consecutively—without any data enrichment, thus mimicking real-world use cases. The x-ray images were initially reviewed and classified by a radiologist according to 5 categories: normal (548), clinically irrelevant findings (281), clinically relevant findings (327), urgent findings (494), and critical findings (21).
Lunit INSIGHT CXR showed a very high AUC of 0.908 for detecting normal cases and at a high specificity of 95%, it was simulated that around half of the normal radiographs could be safely removed from the worklist. Therefore, the results show that the workload for the radiologist could be significantly reduced with the usage of AI.