Medical Display Market Shifts From CRT To Flat Panel LCD Displays
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, U.S. Medical Display Monitor Markets, reveals that revenue in this industry totaled $281.1 million in 2004 and can reach $602.9 million in 2011.
If you are interested in a virtual brochure, which provides manufacturers, end users, and other industry participants an overview of the latest analysis of the U.S. Medical Display Monitor Markets, then send an e-mail to Melina Gonzalez, Corporate Communications at mgonzalez@frost.com with the following information: your full name, company name, title, telephone number, fax number and e-mail address. Upon receipt of the above information, an overview will be sent to you via e-mail.
"Even the field of mammography, one of the last bastions for high-end CRT-based displays, has gradually started adopting LCD monitors following the recent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of five mega pixel high-resolution screens for diagnostic analysis," remarks Frost & Sullivan Senior Industry Analyst Katherine Shariq.
Cheaper CRT displays continue to retain some appeal for many hospital units that often have tight capital budgets. In those circumstances many end users tend to consider the price factor alone when purchasing medical display monitors, and this prevents them from making informed long-term analysis of the pros and cons of true ownership costs.
For instance, CRT-based displays are prone to image degradation and drift as early as a year and a half after installation, and require regular manual calibration for the next three to four years of their active life. On the contrary, flat panel display images are very stable and in the rare event of drift occurring, putting in a new backlight can correct the error.
However, regular calibration testing continues to be a critical requirement for both types of displays to ensure compliance with the Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) standard as well as to guarantee that clinicians obtain the most accurate diagnostic images. Such frequent calibration across an entire radiology and picture archiving communication systems (PACS) environment requires a huge amount of administrative time and labor.
Many medical diagnostic PACS display manufacturers now offer automated calibration testing, although this has typically been limited to a single display. While this provides some efficiency gains and cost savings, the need for manual documentation of the testing procedures and results remains.
Due to the routine calibration requirements for both CRT and LCD displays and the similar administrative costs in both cases, end users with tight budgets have not fully evaluated the significantly lower cost of ownership afforded by LCD displays.
Flat panel LCD displays are now available with automated calibration software packages. Although more expensive than their manually calibrated counterparts, these automatic solutions offer numerous advantages. Apart from ensuring DICOM conformance through backlight stability, they also document the time of testing the display and any adjustments made therein. Additionally, they enable the printing of reports from the archive records.
"LCD monitor manufacturers need to perform total cost of ownership studies with the early adopters," says Shariq. "They need to aggressively market the productivity gains and lower ownership cost associated with automated calibrations to rapidly grow market share."
U.S. Medical Display Monitor Markets is part of the Medical Imaging subscription. It offers detailed market metrics and forecasts that aid accurate business planning as well as a comprehensive pricing analysis. The research also identifies new areas of expansion for medical display monitor manufacturers. Analyst interviews are available to the press.