The challenge
An international company in the medical technology sector wished to respond more flexibly to the needs of its clinical customers of the human-machine interface (HMI) for computed tomography (CT) devices. The goal was to digitalize various hardware control elements by showing them on a touch display. Additionally, the company wanted a simplified, intuitive workflow. Because there is a wide variety of application scenarios of CT devices in hospitals, up to four touch displays must be able to synchronously show the same user interface and send instructions to the central control unit. The touch technology was an interesting and new experiment for the customer, and they purposely did not determine all requirements at the project start to leave scope for new ideas.
Project duration and resourcing
- About two years
- One project manager and requirements engineer
- One systems engineer
- One developer (C#, .NET)
Our approach: Touch software in C# (.NET)
UL Solutions Software Intensive Systems (SIS) joined the project just after it started. Together with our customer, our team made the project agile with Scrum to leave scope for flexible goals in terms of content. Additionally, the team made the project progress transparent, with regular sprint reviews. Since SIS is certified according to ISO 13485, the team embedded the Scrum process in the customer’s existing process model, according to the standards ISO 14971, IEC 62366 and IEC 62304.
The biggest technical challenge for the team was the complex integral system that was required to continue supporting the CT devices without touch display. The team defined a very small interface to the touch display, and the entire touch logic was realized with a separate and optional software module. This enabled the team to implement the touch software in C# (.NET); the existing integral system (developed in C++) required only minimal changes. During the project, SIS engineers regularly provided important logic keys. The team specified the approach for frictionless implement design changes of the user interface into the source code of the system to be built. After this project, several SIS employees, together with the customer, maintained their clinical validation in the radiology units of several international hospitals.
Customer benefits
The customer was able to deliver the first CT scanner with touch interface within a relatively ambitious schedule due the SIS team's deep knowledge and technical expertise in software engineering and in agile approaches in the medical sector. The SIS project manager and the systems engineer worked closely with the customer’s clinical experts to find the best approaches, even in challenging project situations.
The touch software component is very modular, allowing innovative feature expansions of future CT scanners to integrated with minimal effort.
Key customer benefits
- On-time delivery of the CT scanner with touch interface
- Easy feature expansion
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