Playing games across three or more large displays provides a more immersive and realistic gaming experience, and AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology is all the rage with gamers. However, this technology can also have a significant impact on medical imaging and diagnostics.

AMD Professional Graphics is working closely with Barco, a global technology company designing and developing visualization solutions for a variety of selected professional markets, and its medical imaging division to bring AMD Eyefinity technology to its customer base. Barco offers a line of mammography, surgical, diagnostic and clinical review displays and the company relies on ATI FirePro™ professional graphics to control these displays.

Radiology professionals working with MRI, CT and Mammography medical imaging systems need multiple displays to review patient information and their images simultaneously, or review several large scans at once. While using more than one display is not a new concept for medical imaging, the ability to drive three large, high resolution 5 or 10 megapixel displays from one professional graphics card is.[i]

With the enhanced power and performance of ATI FirePro professional graphics and AMD Eyefinity technology, Barco’s MXRT display controllers allow clinicians to use three displays to view data or images across multiple windows for increased efficiency and accuracy. Additionally, an emerging trend in medical imaging is the art of taking several individual MRI or CT scans and combining them to create 3D reconstructions. You can see an example of this in the image included below.

ATI FirePro™ professional graphics enable high quality, high resolution 10-bit grayscale 2D output for medical imaging professionals, providing 1,024 shades of gray, while delivering high performance 3D acceleration. These enhanced visual capabilities are enabled by one ATI FirePro™ professional graphics card, reducing cost and complexity while enabling radiology professionals and doctors to make more accurate diagnoses.

As medical imaging and high resolution images continue to play an important role in medical diagnosis, AMD and Barco are focused on meeting customer demands for the highest possible visual experience.

Mitch Furman is a senior product manager, Professional Graphics at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

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[i] AMD Eyefinity technology can support up to 6 displays using a single enabled ATI FirePro™ graphics card with Windows Vista or Windows 7 operating systems – the number of displays may vary by board design and you should confirm exact specifications with the applicable manufacturer before purchase.  AMD Eyefinity technology works with applications that support non-standard aspect ratios, which is required for panning across multiple displays. To enable more than two displays, additional panels with native DisplayPort connectors, and/or DisplayPort compliant active adapters to convert your monitor’s native input to your cards DisplayPort or Mini-DisplayPort connector(s), are required.  SLS (“Single Large Surface”) functionality requires an identical display resolution on all configured displays.