Munich, Germany-based Brainlab has announced the launch of  VoyantLink, a cloud-based image sharing, viewing, and enrichment platform for clinicians, hospitals and imaging centres at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

VoyantLink is the first service/product of its kind to move beyond image sharing to an effective cloud-based workspace, where users are able to access their images in the cloud, as well as launch and employ clinical planning tools and push completed plans to any device or storage location.

Capitalizing on the largest annual radiology meeting's theme for 2011, 'Celebrate the Image,' VoyantLink will contribute to Brainlab's vision in clinical decision-making.

“The image voyage through VoyantLink is like no other service on the market today. The difference that Brainlab brings to the clinical cloud is the enrichment of patient exams, offering physician users more and better information that will help them with critical decision-making and potentially improve outcomes,” said Stefan Vilsmeier, president and CEO of Brainlab. “VoyantLink realizes the Brainlab vision of making medical technology and knowledge more impactful and accessible to physicians and patients.”

Users of VoyantLink can send, receive, share and save images, like with most online or cloud-based image sharing clinical networks, but this is where the similarity ends. VoyantLink takes these capabilities a step beyond image sharing and opens an entirely new arena, one in which image sharing is a means to the greater end of improved clinical decision-making.

Once the image is inside the VoyantLink cloud, a powerful set of clinical tools are available, including effective live collaboration, data enrichment, and planning applications such as digital templating, mobile applications, workflow automation, dose review, dose planning, and image fusion.

VoyantLink streamlines existing patient exam management processes and provides integration with the Brainlab portfolio of advanced treatment software for control of patient data throughout the treatment cycle. In addition to facilitating decision-making, data management and patient data control, cost savings are also a key benefit of the product.

“VoyantLink can decrease the costs of transfer by eliminating CDs and other manual transfer methods, and eliminate the whole process of VPNs,” said Marc Mackey, general manager of Voyant Health. “But not only do facilities and physicians have access to effective image sharing with VoyantLink, they can also access multiple enrichment tools that liberate clinical decision making from a particular workstation, device, or location.”

Brainlab acquired Voyant Health in June 2011 and has since been combining synergistic technologies and strengthening reach and distribution. By combining the capabilities of VoyantLink, Orthoweb and Quentry, Brainlab not only makes diagnostic images available anytime, anywhere, and on any device, but also makes enriching, sharing and using that data for surgical treatment easier.

Brainlab technology drives collaboration between hospitals and clinicians from a wide variety of subspecialties including neurosurgery and spinal surgery, oncology, orthopaedics, ENT, CMF, trauma.