MayTay was founded in mid-2008 by Gordon McNeilly in order to provide software products and services for the
Interpretation of Medical Data. MayTay's aim is to understand medical workflows, and clinical purpose of the workflows,
in order to design an appropriate user interface into which the right technology can be applied. This aim is based on a confidence
that the technologies that exist currently can be used to provide good solutions to many medical workflow problems, even though they
cannot be used to provide perfect solutions. A good example of this exists in the PACS workstation arena where the large amounts
of data that need to be transferred often, with many current software applications, stops people from working for a significant
percentage of an examination time, while the application is unresponsive (although it may provide a progress bar to somewhat ameliorate
the rage of the user). This simply need not be the case.
So, MayTay's simple aim is not to give in to the tempations of that old adage where perfection becomes the enemy of good, by understanding how
people work, and letting them do just that. MayTay will provide both products and services. The products will showcase a software framework which
can be used to build custom solutions, on which basis the services will be provided.
MayTay has started its operations concentrating on analysis of data output from the common forms of scanners (CT, MRI, PET, ultrasound) but
from the outset will aim for solutions of problems that are in the medical domain, rather than the technological domain. Hence, MayTay's
applications and services will be resolutely clinical in focus, which is reflected in the choice of
company name and logo. We do this in order to distinguish MayTay's value proposition from those
companies who concentrate on solving (often very well) technological difficulties e.g. those associated with processing large amounts of
data. Often, these companies will term their offering as a visualisation or image processing solution, whereas MayTay
uses the term preferred by medical professionals : interpretation of medical data.
Product Plans
MayTay is currently working on the software framework for, and applications associated with, two key problems in Oncology : cancer
detection and cancer follow-up. The two applications are different because the first is a more general data survey tool
that is not necessarily going to be used by an oncology specialist. As cancer is overtaking circulatory system disease as the
most common disease in the Western world we expect that many practitioners, especially in radiology,
will come across cancer while doing routine examinations. However, the follow-up tool will be used by someone doing a study with the
knowledge that they want to use a specific oncology protocol (e.g. RECIST or WHO) for assessing treatment efficacy or treatment options.
Thus the detection tool has the following attributes :
Ability to accept a wide variety of data-sets, and cross-reference (register) them in the case of finding lesions
Ability to help clinicians detect cancers (preferably automatically) by pattern recognition techniques
Ability to enter protocol/measurement mode on detection of cancers for making appropriate reports
And the follow-up tool has the following attributes :
Setup to analyse specific data-sets with a specific protocol
Ability to cross-reference reports and findings from current and previous studies
Ability to analyse treatment options and make prognosis of a specific treatment
The first version of these products will take data typically available on a PACS as its input e.g. DICOM image and radiotherapy
data, as well as previous reports (data from these such as annotations and key images will often be in DICOM too). In later versions
we will interface to data available in other hospital systems.
Services Offered
MayTay is developing a software framework suitable for scientific applications that make extensive use of graphics and
calculations on large data-sets. The framework will have the following features :
Explicitly 'model-view-controller'. The ability to configure views on data or composite views on data
and the linkages of those data to bring about new behaviours/applications.
Layout management. The ability to embed views and composite views into an application as would
be expected with most modern GUI toolkits
Update management. Making use of knowledge of the clinical protocol being employed to update data views
appropriately to make the best use of the resources of the machine. The aim is to allow the user to have interactive
update on any view they are directly interacting with, where updating everything at once synchronously may be
computationally expensive.
Workflow managment. At a higher level than the data linkage, the workflow manager allows the mapping of a dataset
type to layout, updata and data-view linage rules that are desired by a given user for that data set.
Platform agnostic. Although built on one of the Windows GUI toolkits, the framework only needs commonly
available O/S services in order to provide its own services, such as layout management
MayTay will be happy to enter into agreements to either license the framework (or concepts within it) as a product,
or help with integration of the framework and/or development of application-layer elements.
What's in a Name ?
The name is composed of two Japanese words me (pronounced May) and te (pronounced Tay) which mean, respectively,
'eye' and 'hand'. The logo is made up of the Kanji describing the two concepts, eye:
and hand: . The idea for the name comes from the observation
that medicine, for a cerebral profession, is also a hands-on one. Unlike many forms of engineering, doctors actually implement the
things they design. Thus, the concept of the the hand doing what the eye (observation and thinking) mandates. Also, it so happens
that I think the common English phrase hand to eye coordination is the wrong way round : surely it is the eye coordinating
the hand? And the logo is just meant to look like some sort of living being - eye and hand coming together to make a creature !
Contact MayTay
Phone Gordon McNeilly on +44 (0)796 381 6633 or
Company Details
Registration number: SC341922
Location: Eskmills Business Park, Musselburgh, Scotland, UK.
and hand: 
. The idea for the name comes from the observation
that medicine, for a cerebral profession, is also a hands-on one. Unlike many forms of engineering, doctors actually implement the
things they design. Thus, the concept of the the hand doing what the eye (observation and thinking) mandates. Also, it so happens
that I think the common English phrase hand to eye coordination is the wrong way round : surely it is the eye coordinating
the hand? And the logo is just meant to look like some sort of living being - eye and hand coming together to make a creature !