BBN Technologies

BBN Major Healthcare Milestones Applying advanced technologies to healthcare needs for over four decades

• 1963

  Under a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), BBN developed a comprehensive hospital information system to automate information gathering, processing, storage, and retrieval and piloted the system at Massachusetts General Hospital. The project was later spun off as MediTech.

• 1965

  Clinical Investigators at MGH began using the MediTech system to identify trends and associations and generate statistical summaries from large sets of patient data.

• 1971

  Under government sponsorship, BBN developed CAPO (Computer Aids in the Physician’s Office) to automate patient history-taking and installed the system in both individual and group practices.

• 1972

  Implemented the Prophet System for biomedical research, a system for entering, analyzing, and visualizing data for analysis, graphing, statistics, mathematical modeling, and sequence analysis related to understanding the biological behavior of small molecules (potential drugs). Prophet was used at over 100 research institutions for over 30 years, making it one of the longest R&D contracts ever funded by NIH. The system was later adapted for industrial research and called RS/1.

• 1978

  With NIH support, BBN began to develop, install, and support CLINFO, a system to help clinical research investigators store, retrieve, and analyze patient data in written or graphic form. CLINFO was used at over 40 medical research centers.

• 1979

  Evaluated the accuracy of computed tomography in detecting intracranial lesions based on data from a multi-hospital study by the National Cancer Institute.

• 1982

  Developed GenBank, a continually updated collection of all internationally reported nucleic acid sequences. The database grew from an initial 2,000 sequences to more than nine million sequences (10 billion base pairs) and was eventually turned over to the NIH.

  Developed Micro-CSIN™, a microcomputer version of the Chemical Substances Information Network.

• 1986

  Demonstrated that the accuracy of mammogram interpretation can be substantially improved by training techniques that emphasize the scaling of relevant perceptual features and the optimal combination of those features.

• 1991

  Began research on Stereo Digital Mammography, currently in clinical trial and showing significant reductions in both false positive and false negative detections.

• 1994

  Demonstrated an analysis and graphical visualization tool for exploring the structure of proteins.

• 1996

  Sold majority interest in BBN subsidiary, Domain Solutions, producer of ClinTrial™ software, for $36M.

• 2007

  Earned the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX) Society Impact Award for Stereo Digital Mammography System.