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The recent release of Synapse® PACS version 7.4 introduced Fujifilm’s Viewer eXtension (VX); an elective, native application designed to deliver the most optimal Synapse user experience anywhere. In this Q&A, Fujifilm Senior Vice President of Medical Informatics Bill Lacy shares how we got here, initial feedback from customers, and what VX means for the future of Synapse Enterprise Imaging.
Not at all, our server-side processing and our zero viewer are still core to today’s Synapse PACS technology. VX is just an additional deployment option. Strategically, the introduction of VX aligns with our focus on delivering the most optimal user experience. In addition to that focus, VX is now the foundation for us to deliver on other strategic initiatives which require a combination of server-side and desktop processing power. We are not transitioning to VX, but rather adding VX as part of our Synapse viewer user community. We envision the radiologist users will take advantage of the viewer extension at their primary reading location and remotely, while the rest of the user community would continue to access Synapse as they do today.
Our U.S.-based software engineering and product management team must continue to adjust our development strategy based on market conditions. The focus on security in healthcare IT and the changes introduced by third-party operating systems and browsers is something we must constantly adapt to. The introduction of VX is a great example of that as we took advantage of new modern technology to isolate web-based viewer code from ever changing environmental factors. This allows us to deliver a consistently optimal user experience, and much more!
First-and-foremost, the goal of VX’s functionality was to optimize the diagnostic user experience. We took our existing viewer technology with its extremely performant server-side image rendering and brought it into a protected Web2 View application. This allows VX to reduce external unpredictability, like browser inefficiency and network latency, instantly deliver massive datasets to the workstation, and improve responsiveness to user actions. VX manages viewer and canvas controls natively without needing to share desktop or browser controls which can change or be shared with other applications and can affect performance. The result is a consistent, fast, and seamless PACS experience.
First, everything that you can do in our standard Synapse viewer is a capability within VX. What we’ve added within VX is all designed for the diagnostic user. Of course, the first thing a user will notice is the optimized experience of the viewer, which will behave more consistent with traditional desktop applications even though it is still interacting with our server-side technology. Things that might have created brief viewer experience changes in the past, like temporary network fluctuations, browser behavior, or variability in desktops, VX now shields from the user experience.
We then went further to take advantage of features which would have been challenging to deliver without leveraging some of the desktop processing power. For example, allowing users to subscribe to multiple worklists and folders or opening multiple tabs from the viewer to review various studies for the same or different patients. They can also select which studies they’d prefer to cache from any worklist, PowerJacket, or viewer study list grids. We also are delivering more mammography and advanced visualization tools and expanding user preferences. VX also uses intelligent display detection, which identifies high-resolution monitors and automatically expands those monitors to the viewer, while providing scrolling and tuning customizations at the user level.
Again, the focus of VX is on delivering the most optimal diagnostic user experience, especially to our power users!
Frankly, the feedback exceeded our expectations. Our customers are really excited about VX. We started a controlled release process in February of 2024. That lasted only a few months as our clinical training team was so excited about the feedback coming from our first few sites that they started pushing more customers to consider 7.4 earlier.
Our first clinical usage deployments were with a mix of onsite and at-home radiology readers, including mammographers. The upgrades were clean and provided big performance boosts for on-site and at-home reading environments. One user specifically noted that VX made Synapse the fastest PACS they’d seen, with sub-second viewer open times and highly responsive scrolling. Another user could not believe the performance reading at home on lower bandwidth was no different than at the hospital.
Many have also specifically called out our improvements and additions to mammography reading. That is partly a focus on features, but also the experience of reading on VX. We also have already deployed VX within our cardiology sites with 7.4.1 and that feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We are just as excited as our customers to hear all of this great feedback; it tells us that our development efforts are paying off and we are on target with our focus on the user experience!
VX really completes the initial goal of delivering a new modern server-side PACS viewer which extends across radiology, mammography, cardiology and the enterprise. It allows for the most optimal experience regardless of environment or location. Now we are going full speed ahead with strategic initiatives to bring more unique functionalities to this viewer platform such as more unique mammography capabilities, native 3D and visualization capabilities, cardiovascular functions, and other image visualization use cases across the enterprise. Artificial intelligence is also now a focus across all areas of our portfolio and roadmap. Our goal is to optimize the interpretation environment for both the inpatient and outpatient settings, and that goal has never been more achievable with the introduction of version 7 and VX.
Click here to learn more about Synapse VX and schedule your demonstration.