It seems Dr Bill Lees and his team of researchers at the Medical Physics department of Middlesex Hospital and the London University College Hospital have been inundated with enquiries since an item appeared on Independent Television News recently, reporting that the team has a UKP50,000 Transputer-based workstation for interpreting X-rays and ultra-sound images as three-dimensional images that can be rotated and viewed from all angles, achieving a startling improvement in clarity and interpretability. The hospital researchers have built the machine and written all the software in-house, having bought in its Transputer boards from a third party. What has been developed is an eight-Transputer system with an MS-DOS personal computer host. Dr Lees describes it as a very simple, standard hardware configuration, which can easily be turned out on customer demand. Many other products exist, Lees says, which perform the same function as this machine, though most are Sparc-based workstations which run much, much slower. The new system, which has been in development for four years, processes at 200 MIPS – this performance is expected to improve five-fold with the new T9000 Transputer, which is finally due later this year. The software has all been written in Occam for MS-DOS. For other customers to be able to use the system, a lot of conversion work needs to be done to interface to the many various proprietary scan data formats. Dr Lees and his team are prepared to make up these systems for other university research divisions and also for commercial customers – the development team is currently talking to a third party with a view to having it sell turnkey system on a commercial basis. The hardware costs between UKP20,000 and UKP30,000 – with software, a system would cost UKP50,000. Dr Lees says that his team has sold a couple of the innovatory systems already.
