Touch-Interface for a Computed Tomography Device (CT)

Challenge

An international company in the medical technology sector, wished to respond more flexibly to the needs of its clinical customers of the human-machine interface (HMI) for computed tomography devices. The goal was to digitalize various hardware control elements, by showing them on a touch display. Additionally, the company wanted to simplify the workflow and to design it more intuitively. Since there is a huge variety of application scenarios of computed tomography devices in hospitals, up to four touch displays have to synchronously show the same user interface and yet be able to send instructions to the central control unit. The touch technology was an interesting and new experiment for the customer and they purposely did not determine all requirements at the project start to leave scope for new ideas.

 

Duration of the project

About 2 years

About 1 project manager and requirements engineer

1 systems engineer

3 developers (C#, .NET)

Any Questions?

Any questions about our engineering service offers? Feel free to call us!

Contact card open Contact card close

Solution

The Method Park team joined the project just after it started. Together with its customer, the team made the project agile with Scrum, to leave scope for flexible goals, in terms of content. Additionally, the team made the project progress transparent, with regular sprint reviews. Since Method Park is certified according to ISO 13485, the team embedded the Scrum process in the customer’s existing process model, according to the standards ISO 14971, IEC 62366 and IEC 62304.


The biggest technical challenge for the team, was the complex integral system which was required to continue supporting the computed tomography devices without touch display. So the team defined a very small interface to the touch display and the entire touch logic was realized with a separate and optional software module. This enabled the team to implement the touch software in C# (.NET), while the existing integral system (developed in C++) required only minimal changes. During the project, Method Park engineers regularly provided important logic keys for solutions. The team specified the approach for frictionless implement design changes of the user interface into the source code of the system to be build. After this project, several Method Park employees maintained their clinical validation in the radiology units of several international hospitals, together with the customer.

 

Solution

Touch-Software in C# (.NET)

Benefit

The customer was able to deliver the first CT scanner with touch interface within a relatively ambitious schedule. This was due to the deep knowledge of the Method Park team in technical expertise, in software engineering and in agile approaches in the medical sector. The Method Park project manager and the systems engineer, worked closely together with the customer’s clinical experts and they were able to find the best solutions, even in challenging project situations.
The touch software component is very modular, so that innovative feature expansions of future CT scanners can be integrated with minimal effort.

 

Benefit

Delivery of the CT scanner with touch interface in-time

Easy feature expansion

Questions?

If you have questions about our training center, feel free to call us!

Contact card open Contact card close