Merge Healthcare Continues DICOM Leadership With Latest Toolkit Release

November 20, 2009 - In fulfillment of its ongoing 20 year commitment to the medical imaging development community, Merge Healthcare (NASDAQ: MRGE), announced the release of MergeCOM-3™ Version 4.1, with the latest standard supplements to its industry-leading DICOM interface implementation toolkit. As a member of the DICOM Standards Committee, Merge has maintained a policy of incorporating all significant changes to the DICOM standard within 3 months of adoption by the Committee.

“This release of MergeCOM-3 further demonstrates the investment we are making into standards based interoperability and health information exchange.”, said Justin Dearborn, CEO of Merge Healthcare, “Driving early adoption of standards in specialized areas such as Ultrasound CAD is a critical first step in delivering a cost effective and relevant IT infrastructure for healthcare providers.”

Version 4.1 adds support for the following DICOM standard supplements:
Supplement 43 – Storage of 3D Ultrasound Images
Supplement 119 – Instance and Frame Level Retrieve SOP Classes
Supplement 126 – Colon Computer-Aided Detection SR SOP Class
Additionally, the MergeCOM-3™ HL7 Toolkit now provides full dictionary support for all v2 releases of the standard, giving customers the ability to implement interfaces for any HL7-enabled medical device or information system.

Because of its dedication to the advancement of open standards software development, MergeCOM-3 is widely used in medical devices and systems today. Earlier this year, Merge added support for the HL7 standard as well, making the MergeCOM-3 toolkits the only source for DICOM/HL7 development. MergeCOM-3 is available for a variety of operating systems and programming platforms, including Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista, Linux and Unix operating systems; C/C++, C#/.Net and Java programming platforms; supporting both 32 and 64 bit run-time environments.