PAIRE was created in 2021 with the aim of developing software solutions to help nuclear physicians in their daily routine. It all started with Pionus, software as medical device that detects, segments and quantifies abnormalities on PET-CT FDG examinations. Augmenting nuclear physician with Pionus helps them save time, avoir mistakes and enable them to access complex biomarkers in clinical routine.
Pionus has been built on the largest database of annotated PET-CT FDG examinations. PAIRE puts great effort to making this database heterogenous and representative of each manufacturer, modality type, modality age, various type of configuration pathologies (indicated for FDG) and patient age (above 18).
Pionus is intended for assisting nuclear medicine physicians in the detection and analysis of hypermetabolic foci in PET-CT examinations, after their review of images and before the writing of the report.
Pionus acts frictionless for the physician. Pionus triggers automatically the computation and image generation when PET-CT series are received on the DICOM node. These series are either sent from modalities automatically (by adding a routing rule to the protocol) or by manually sending exams from a viewer or PACS through the DICOM messaging protocol.
The two only required series are an attenuation corrected PET and a CT DICOM series.
The software outputs DICOMS interpretable by physicians in their workstation or PACS systems. Output DICOM format include among others Secondary Captures Dicom Files or DICOM RT-struct files.
The detection algorithm leverages recent advances in informatics and mathematics called Deep Learning. When first machine learning techniques used to require engineers to develop hand-made patterns to be detected (spheres, squares, sharp intensity difference), the Deep Learning enable to automatically learn the patterns to be detected within an image by providing it with several thousands of manually annotated examinations, for hundreds of time. The result called a “trained neural network” is then rigorously evaluated on hundreds of exams by professional nuclear physicians to assess its performance and benefit.
At PAIRE, we trained an AI to detect lesions automatically based on tens of thousands of lesions manually annotated by expert Nuclear Physicians.
Within optimal conditions, the device can help nuclear medicine physicians to localize abnormal FDG uptake. The use of Pionus in clinical routine brings several benefits to the patient and clinician. Clinical benefits for the patient include but are not limited to a more accurate staging, better evaluation of the pathology. Clinical benefits for the clinician include but are not limited to faster and more accurate image analysis.