News Briefs (Jan. 30, 2006)

Alcatel has signed a three-year agreement with Global Imaging Online, a French company specializing in medical treatment and diagnostic imagery, to enable provide broadband Internet access at rural medical centers for the purpose of exchanging medical images and enabling remote diagnoses by hospitals in Africa and abroad. . . . Centice Corp., a San Jose, Calif., developer of sensor technology, announced that spectroscopy instrument maker Newport Corp. has selected its multimodal multiplex spectroscopy (MMS) technology for its new spectrometer platform. As a result of this agreement, Newport will be the first company to offer a UV-Vis spectrometer based on Centice's MMS technology, which simultaneously samples 500 optical channels through a wide area aperture instead of a through a narrow slit, as with conventional designs. Newport demonstrated its initial offering -- a compact system available in a 190-500 nm spectral range with 0.6-nm resolution, a wide-area aperture and cooled back-thinned CCD -- last week at Photonics West 2006. . . . Fischer Imaging Corp. announced recently that Eastman Kodak Co. will service and support its mammography products, including SenoScan digital mammography and MammoTest stereotactic breast biopsy systems. Fischer closed the sale of its mammography assets to Hologic Inc. in September; with Hologic's consent, it granted Kodak a nonexclusive limited license to use mammography assets necessary to provide service and support on the installed base of SenoScan and MammoTest systems. . . . Robert H. Brust, Kodak's chief financial officer and executive vice president, will retire from the company when his employment contract expires at the end of January 2007, the company said. A search for a new CFO is underway. Brust joined Kodak in 2000 from Unisys Corp. after a 31-year career at General Electric.