Philips
Organisation Profile
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands is a diversified Health and Well-being company, focused on improving people’s lives through meaningful innovations. As a world leader in healthcare, lifestyle and lighting, Philips integrates technologies and design into people-centric solutions, based on fundamental customer insights and the brand promise of “sense and simplicity”.
Headquartered in the Netherlands, Philips employs over 118,000 employees with sales and services in more than 100 countries worldwide. With sales of EUR 24.8 billion in 2012, the company is a market leader in cardiac care, acute care and home healthcare, energy efficient lighting solutions and new lighting applications, as well as lifestyle products for personal well-being and pleasure with strong leadership positions in male shaving and grooming, portable entertainment and oral healthcare. Philips is a global leader across its healthcare, lighting and lifestyle portfolio:
- We are the world’s largest home healthcare company, being number one in: Monitoring systems, Automated External Defibrillators, Cardiac Ultrasound, Cardiovascular X-ray.
- We are number one in lamps in Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific and number two in North America; in Automotive lighting, we are leading in Europe, Latin America, Japan and Asia Pacific.
Healthcare
Philips simplifies healthcare by focusing on the people in the care cycle – patients and care providers. Through combining human insights and clinical expertise, Philips aim to improve patient outcomes while lowering the burden on the healthcare system. Advanced healthcare solutions are a fundamental part of the portfolio for both healthcare professionals and consumers, to meet the needs of patients in hospitals and at home. Philips Healthcare employs approximately 35,500 people worldwide.
Innovation
50,000 registered patents illustrate the innovative nature of the company. Philips currently holds around 36,000 registered trademarks, 63,000 design rights and 3,900 domain names.
Philips has adopted an Open Innovation strategy which leverages the joint innovative power of partnering companies and researchers to bring more innovations to the market effectively and faster. In 2010, Philips invested EUR 1.58 billion in Research and Development.
Philips Healthcare
Philips Healthcare is international company that develops and manufactures a large variety of medical products in many sites. Philips is one of the top 3 manufacturers of MR and ultrasound scanners worldwide. Philips Healthcare MR Finland, with a staff of some 100 persons, is focused on MRI-based therapies. The main activities are in development and commercialization of MRI real-time systems, a system for MR guided high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) therapy, MR-based Radiotherapy simulation, and MRI guidance LINAC therapies. The group includes all the industrial functions necessary to release their own standalone products: R&D, clinical Affairs, marketing, product applications, and regulatory. Philips Healthcare Finland has a rich experience developing products for MRI guided interventional procedures, for guidance of biopsy, thermal therapy and radiotherapy. Together with former Nycomed-Amersham (presently a part of GE Healthcare) PMS Finland (former Marconi) has developed equipment for use with dynamically polarized contrast agents.
Philips Technologie GmbH
Philips Research in Hamburg (Philips Technologie GmbH, Innovative Technologies, Research Laboratories, Germany; about 100 employees) is a world leading industrial healthcare research site for MR devices (MR imaging, MR guided interventions/therapy systems) and MR applications as well as for other medical imaging modalities like X-ray imaging, computed tomography and magnetic particle imaging as well as image processing research. Research results are implemented in products of Philips Healthcare, which is one of the top three worldwide vendors of medical imaging systems.
Among many other government funded research projects, PRH has successfully participated in EU funded projects, like FP7-Meditrans (2006-2010), FP7-SONODRUGS (2007-2012) and the currently starting project FP7-VPH-DARE
IT (2013-) with a strong focus on researching novel MRI methodology (image acquisition, quantification, reconstruction and processing) and providing those to partners in the consortia for pre-clinical/clinical exploration.
For the execution of the present project, the laboratory is well equipped with 3 state-of-the-art clinical MRI systems (1.5T&3T Philips Achieva + 3T Philips Ingenia) used for hardware and software testing in volunteer and in-vitro investigations. The involved researcher has 10 years of experience in MRI methodology research and clinical applications of MRI technology in diagnosis and for therapy guidance.