Hologic and Siemens Announce Intent to Form Strategic Alliance

BEDFORD, Mass., and ERLANGEN, Germany, Nov. 26 -- Hologic Inc. and Siemens AG announced they intend to enter into a strategic alliance to develop second-generation digital mammography systems. They plan to combine Hologic's proprietary amorphous selenium direct-to-digital mammography technology with Siemens' proprietary software for a dedicated physician's workstation. Details of the alliance will be negotiated over the next several months.

Siemens and Hologic said they want to combine their proprietary mammography technologies and expertise to bring to market direct-to-digital mammography systems and to migrate the current technology to the next generation of mammography systems, to enable clinicians to perform "breakthrough" imaging procedures of the breast.

In addition, Siemens and Hologic want to jointly develop an image acquisition console that will offer customers a fully integrated approach to breast cancer detection. Proprietary Siemens software will be used to build a dedicated physician's workstation that would improve workflow and patient throughput and be prepared to integrate future digital computer-aided detection applications.

Siemens and Hologic will display their current technologies at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America Nov. 25-30 in Chicago.