The technological heart of the Alna group beats in the Innovation center, also known internally as “Future 1� (abbreviated as “F1�). At 2004 Q4 it has been established as a separate department that resides at headquarters in Vilnius.

F1 works closely with all Alna group companies. This allows us to create cross functional teams involving employees from business units, thus creating synergy and achieving excellent results in a short time. We are teaming with universities, science institutes and other academic institutions commercializing technologies developed in science research labs.

Our mission is to challenge the whole Alna group to innovate and bring value to our customers, employees and shareholders. We’re taking steps to create new products and services, adoption of new business models, bringing emerging technologies to our customers.

Currently F1 is looking into fields related to telecommunications, medical imaging, collaboration solutions and Enterprise software.

An Alna innovation lab showcases a few of our ideas we’re working on right now.

Eureka! CTBSTROKE.

Computed Tomography (CT) is still the modality of first choice for investigating patients who have suffered an acute stroke. Within the first hours after onset of stroke, the detection of ischemic regions is very difficult on CT images. Ischemic stroke volume is an important topic in the radiology field. Patient status depends on ischemic stroke size, stroke localization and place of injury. For scientific medical studies dealing with ischemic it is useful to calculate the volume of an ischemic stroke. A manual calculation of the place and volume of an ischemic stroke is very time consuming. Widespread semi-automated methods give only approximate results. In addition, such software is very expensive and thus not available to low-budget hospitals, especially in Eastern Europe.
The automatic analysis of computed Tomography images is done through pattern recognition and volume reconstruction tasks. The stroke volume calculation will be performed in the first part, and stroke 3-D visualization in the second part. All such operations will be done with personal computers without the help of expensive, powerful workstations. Such a computer aided medical diagnostic tool will be available for common middle-price computers and would be used in all hospitals with a neurological department. Alna is developing this project jointly with Vilnius Gediminas Technical University.

Idea management system - iShare

Idea management is part of process we implemented at Alna group to gather and process ideas coming from all the group employees. Everybody can share their ideas and eventually benefit from idea implementation. We see idea management as a tremendous boost to our creative process and innovation inside the company.