What are appropriate turnaround times as images pass through the different stages of a clinical trial? Is the pharmaceutical industry applying outmoded thinking? Here's the context for such questions. A few weeks back, we ran an article on benchmarks in imaging. In brief, Perceptive Informatics, a division of Parexel, had adopted some standards in consultation with a nonprofit organization called the Metrics Champions Consortium. It all seemed noncontroversial. Then Jon DeVries, general manager of the eclinical business at Merge, got in touch. He competes with Perceptive and suggested, in a gentle and polite manner, that the ClinPage editorial pencil may not have been at its sharpest when that article was written. Specifically, DeVries said, the clinical trial world can ask more of imaging core labs in 2010. His view? Digital systems to move and manage images offer such big savings in time and money that the MCC benchmarks may already be…more...