Adaptive Video gears up business

Adaptive Video moved its headquarters from San Rafael, CA, toa larger facility in nearby Novato in March. The supplier of video-frame-grabbingand digital interfaces is boosting its sales and marketing effortunder the leadership of president Michael Franco.

Franco developed the firm's medical image interface and printspooling products and holds the patents on this technology. Formerlyvice president of engineering, he replaced Michael Gray as presidentin December. Franco, Gray and John Cullens were co-founders ofAdaptive Video. The later two executives remain shareholders andadvisers to the company.

Adaptive Video is negotiating with OEM customers to transferits many informal supply arrangements into contractual agreements,said Tony Wade, vice president of sales. The company also plansto quadruple the size of its direct sales force, he said.

Much of the company's optimism arises from the high volumeof business generated at last November's Radiological Societyof North America meeting, where Adaptive Video's four sales representativeswere much in demand, Wade said.

Adaptive Video has about 450 installations of its interfaceand laser printer spooler products worldwide, he said. The spoolercan take medical images from as many as six input devices andprovide output to two laser cameras and an image archive.

The company hopes to introduce a new optical disk archive/imagedatabase product by the end of this year, according to Franco.The Laser Management System will automatically archive digitalimages on disk and input patient information into a database eachtime an image is sent to the printer. Users can then manipulateand call up past images. For instance, all head scans performedover a certain period could be reviewed, he said.

Although some laser camera vendors are discussing an exchangeof system protocols so users can more easily interface with differentprinters (SCAN 2/27/91), there will be a continued need for networkingof images from multiple modalities with different laser cameras,Franco said.

Adaptive Video has signed laser protocol agreements with mostmajor laser camera vendors, including 3M, Kodak, Du Pont, Konicaand Fuji, he said.

The firm's digital capture system operates at a speed of 135MHz, significantly faster than laser printers, said John Ariatti,a consultant to Adaptive Video. Ariatti is helping the companydevelop its growth strategy. He was formerly MRI director of marketingfor Toshiba America Medical Systems, and prior to that was vicepresident of sales & marketing for MPDI, a now-defunct medicalimage processing company.

The fast capture speed is useful when working with new high-line-ratemonitors, which are becoming more prevalent in the medical imagingarena, he said.