SCCT Presentations Showcase GE Healthcare’s Innovative Technologies Designed for the Toughest Challenges in Cardiac CT Imaging

Montreal, Quebec, CANADA – GE Healthcare’s newest CT technologies will be discussed in multiple presentations at the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography (SCCT) Annual Scientific Meeting, which opened today. Saturday’s session, “Innovative Technologies in CT That Directly Impact Daily Practice,” will highlight innovations from the GE Discovery* CT750 HD FREEdom Edition, launched at last year’s SCCT, that have quickly made an impact in routine clinical use.

“The toughest CT challenges include Cardiac CT for high heart rate patients or patients with highly calcified vessels, improving CT performance to help reduce the cost of healthcare, and obtaining the highest CT image quality at the lowest possible dose,” said Eric Stahre, GE CT General Manager for GE Healthcare. “Our FREEdom technologies address these challenges in a significant way, and in less than one year after their introduction, we now have more than 300 installations worldwide.”

Lower Dose Cardiac CT

Over the past 15 years, GE Healthcare has invested more than $800 million to help redefine “low dose” with innovative image reconstruction technologies and novel dose-reporting solutions. GE Healthcare’s SnapShot* Pulse and ASiR*^ enable lower dose not only for coronary CT but across other cardiovascular exams. Published results of two multi-center trials utilizing ASiR* for cardiac imaging showed a significant reduction of dose compared to Filtered Back Projection (FBP) by using ASiR*[1] and when using a standardized protocol with ASiR*, the average dose was 1.3mSv for routinely acquired Cardiac CT patients[2].
New at this year’s SCCT, GE introduced kV Assist, a SMART technology that provides optimized personalized scan settings and applications with automated kV and mA selection. kV Assist complements last year’s introduction of another SMART technology, SnapShot* Assist. Combined they deliver the desired image quality at the lowest possible dose, and workflow optimizations for efficient Cardiac CT.

Motion FREEdom with Intelligent Motion Correction

FREEdom Edition technologies on the Discovery CT750 HD FREEdom Edition and the Optima* CT660 FREEdom Edition help to solve the toughest challenges in cardiac CT. While gantry speed alone cannot completely freeze coronary motion, especially at high heart rates, SnapShot* Freeze intelligent coronary motion correction is designed to deliver an effective temporal resolution of 29msec. At this year’s SCCT, GE will showcase SnapShot Freeze.

“The FREEdom Edition has taken cardiac scanning to a new level in my facility,” said Dr. James Earls of Fairfax Radiology. "SnapShot Freeze is now completely integrated into my clinical paradigm and is used routinely in patients with both low and high heart rates to help deliver diagnostic quality images in virtually every case.”

Calcium FREEdom with the World’s 1st Cardiac Spectral CT

Built on the Gemstone Spectral Imaging (GSI) Technology, GSI Cardiac has enabled physicians around the world with the ability to enhance the visual assessment of coronary vessel patency in the presence of calcification. The ability to alternate two kVp energies at 0.25 msec leads to exceptional temporal registration vital for coronary vessel imaging and accurate material separation.

According to Dr. Earls, “with GSI Cardiac, we have enhanced visualization of the coronary lumen in cases of high calcified plaque loads. We do this by viewing the vessels at different monochromatic energies using the GSI Viewer 3D. Previous challenges encountered because of calcium blooming in the coronaries and beam hardening in the myocardium have been reduced and overall image quality improved"

* Trademark of General Electric Company

^ In clinical practice, the use of ASiR may reduce CT patient dose depending on the clinical task, patient size, anatomical location and clinical practice. A consultation with a radiologist and a physician should be made to determine the appropriate dose to obtain diagnostic image quality for the particular clinical task.

[1] “Estimated Radiation Dose Reduction Using Adaptive Statistical Iterative Reconstruction in Coronary CT Angiography: The ERASIR Study”, (Leipsic, et al, AJR:195, September 2010)

[2] “Effect of Standardized Quality-Improvement Protocol on Radiation Dose in Coronary Computed Tomographic Angiography”, (LaBounty et al, Am J Cardiol 2010;106:1633-1667)



About GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our broad expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, performance improvement and performance solutions services help our customers to deliver better care to more people around the world at a lower cost. In addition, we partner with healthcare leaders, striving to leverage the global policy change necessary to implement a successful shift to sustainable healthcare systems.

Our “healthymagination” vision for the future invites the world to join us on our journey as we continuously develop innovations focused on reducing costs, increasing access and improving quality around the world. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employees are committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com.

For our latest news, please visit http://newsroom.gehealthcare.com/http://newsroom.gehealthcare.com