Author: Frank van der Linden, Philips Medical Systems
December 2004

Philips Medical Systems (PMS) produces equipment used by practitioners in the hospitals to support medical diagnosis using medical images. The products of PMS are both dealing with the production of images (modalities) and post-processing, storage and diagnosis support (non-modalities). Examples of modalities are X-ray, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computer Tomography (CT), and Ultrasound (US).

This success story describes the use of a central group producing a medical middleware platform, to be used by other product lines in the company. The platform itself is a product line in itself. Different product groups use different variants and platform configurations. Within many of the product groups software running on top of the imaging platform is built in software product lines as well. This induces additional variability requirements to the platform.

Products are created in several parts of the world, and within each product group, typically several product lines are available. Although the products in the different lines differ a lot, there is also a lot of similar software between them. Examples are store, retrieve, and exchange of images, and all kinds of image processing and viewing. Because of this, an initiative was started to produce the central software for all these lines as an imaging platform to be used by the whole of PMS. In the recent years, several acquisitions have taken place increasing the portfolio of modalities and non-modalities to come to a complete range of products for the hospitals. In order to increase the synergy between the newly acquired and the existing groups, and reduce the development costs of all, the imaging platform has to be used, and has to be usable within the whole company.

Many well-known reasons to start with software product line development also apply to PMS. These are: