Cmr42: Seeing the Human Heart in a New Way

Greg Ogrodnick has had a passion for medical technology since embarking on a career in biotech 25 years ago and has founded and succeeded in several business ventures that have established him as a true specialist in cardiac technology. In 2007 he was introduced to cardiologist Dr Matthias Friedrich of the Stephenson Cardiac MR Centre at the Foothills Hospital in Calgary. Ogrodnick, a seasoned veteran of the medical technology field was fascinated with a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) software concept Dr Friedrich presented to him. With the backing of local investors and University Technologies International (UTI), Ogrodnick stepped in to take over the helm at Circle Cardiovascular Inc. taking what was then an unformed string of code and developing it into commercially viable software that would soon become the leading cardiac MRI software in the world, cmr42.

The Heart of the Matter

Inspired by doctors and developed in collaboration with a number of medical professionals, cmr42 is poised to change the way in which cardiologists consider data and make diagnosis’ based on cardiology patients' tests. cmr42 merges many of the disparate procedures of MR (magnetic resonance) imaging and unifies them into a single computer program viewable on any commercially available laptop or desktop computer, valuing accuracy and qualitative measurements in addition to quantitative data. cmr42 is meant to take the complications out of a difficult imaging technique and make the diagnosis of cardiac ailments easier.

Once the technology was in place, Ogrodnick and Friedrich focused their energies on creating a product in tandem with the cardiologists who would use it. cmr42 was developed using 45 beta test internet sites in April 2008, which collected user data from cardiologists the world over. The result demonstrated how radically a physicians' workflow process was altered, improving wait times from scan to diagnosis significantly – from a matter of days or weeks to minutes - an optimization that is at the heart of the Circle's mission statement.

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