Medical Applications

How Many Lives Have You Saved Today?

Medical devices help us live longer, better lives, but creating the software that empowers them presents some unique challenges to developers. Whether your product is to be deployed in a hospital or sold in a drug store for use at home, system failures are simply not an option when a person’s health is at stake.

Your choice of software development platform hugely impacts your ability not only to get medical devices to market, but to do so profitably. Mentor Graphics’ Nucleus OS and EDGE Developer Suite provide the solution, offering a proven, high performance and flexible software development platform which empowers a vast range of medical applications in use today.

Five reasons why Nucleus is the right choice for medical applications

Reduced certification costs – When you build your Nucleus-based application, only those lines of code which are actually used get compiled into the final image. By ensuring code size is kept to a minimum, Nucleus OS can significantly reduce your certification costs, since certification effort is directly proportional to the lines of code being tested. And the certification process itself is simplified because source code is provided as standard for all Nucleus OS products.
A future proof solution that scales to meet your needs – While you may not need all of the capabilities of Nucleus OS today, you can be sure that as your products evolve, you will be able to draw upon a comprehensive range of integrated core services to accommodate each new requirement while maximizing the return on your existing software investment.
HIPAA compliant and IPv6 Ready™ for secure network-enabled medical applications – Nucleus OS is known for its secure, comprehensive and robust networking credentials. Wired or wireless, portable or not, Nucleus Networking Services (including 802.11 WiFi) offer everything you need to keep medical information private and inaccessible to prying eyes.
Proven in over 90 FDA Class II and Class III devices – Nucleus OS has been deployed in over 90 FDA Class II and Class III certified products, and has been selected as the software platform of choice by a wide range of medical device manufacturers including Bayer, Aspect Medical, Metran America, Analogic, ZOLL Medical Corporation, Plexar and many others.
Deliver more usable products in less time – Usability is essential for any product whose incorrect use could ultimately cost lives. Nucleus GUI Services incorporates an advanced menu-driven interface engine designed specifically with usability in mind. New user interfaces can be created, tested and refined in minutes within the EDGE Developer Suite, and all this can be done by graphic designers since all aspects of a GUI design may be modified visually without any coding or scripting.

Win a Nintendo Wii complete with Operation Medical game.

Nucleus Inside

ZOLL Medical Corporation (heart defibrillator)
ZOLL Medical Corporation used Nucleus OS to develop ZOLL AED Plus – an automated external defibrillator.

“The Nucleus OS has been an extremely effective platform for all of our defibrillator products. We have been especially pleased with the software’s reliability and ease of use, and plan to continue developing with the Nucleus software in the future.”
– Ziad Elghazzawi, Ph.D., Director of Alternate Care Products Engineering, ZOLL Medical Corporation

Instrumentation Laboratory (blood analysis)
Instrumentation Laboratory used Nucleus OS running on multiple processors to develop the ACL TOP blood analyzer.

“We’ve been extremely happy with the Nucleus OS through the entire product development from early breadboard through instrument integration to product validation. During breadboard development, it was the ease of bringing up the system and emulators; at instrument integration, it was the ease of debugging; and finally, at product validation, it was the comfort of knowing that the Nucleus OS was highly reliable.”
– Tim Kelleher, Vice President Software Strategy and Development, Instrumentation Laboratory

Analogic Corporation (fetal heart monitor)
Analogic Corporation used Nucleus OS to develop FETALGARD Lite™ – a low-cost, modular, portable, antepartum fetal monitor.

"We selected Nucleus OS because it's the leading source-code embedded OS available and because our chosen CPU model was explicitly supported. This is not always true of competing OSes. We found Nucleus OS very easy to integrate into our product and debugging environment. In fact, the board-support code was invaluable in bringing up our hardware. We haven't had any problems with Nucleus OS or run into any bugs over the two years we've used it. It will definitely be a part of our next product, too."
– Mark Egler, Principal Engineer, Analogic Corporation

ZONARE Medical Systems (ultrasound system)
ZONARE Medical Systems used Nucleus OS (including Nucleus Networking Services, Nucleus USB Services, and Nucleus File System Services) to develop z.one - the first Convertible Ultrasound platform.

"Nucleus OS has performed very well for our Convertible Ultrasound solution. Our development projects have taken advantage of the full-featured set of I/O packages (such as networking, USB and a file system) all of which utilize Mentor Graphics' cost effective products. A stable embedded OS, combined with access to source code and capable technical support engineers, has helped us to deliver our unique solution to the ultrasound community in a very timely manner."
– Andy Irish, Director of Software, ZONARE Medical Systems, Inc.