Research and development challenges of CARS for industry

As the amount of information available to a physician has increased, the complexity of physician tasks has increased. The information management challenge faced by the clinicians translates to an opportunity for the industry to build solutions, not just products, that help improve the overall quality of clinical care processes, while reducing their costs. These apparently conflicting goals can be achieved only by viewing healthcare as a whole from the objective of benefiting the ultimate customer, the patient. The process of building clinically relevant solutions requires a clear understanding of clinical tasks (problem definition), and developing and deploying solutions such that they will have a quantifiable impact on patient care. In this paper, I will present a framework for development of clinically useful solutions, and present R&D challenges and new developments in selected areas of computer-assisted radiology and surgery.