GE Healthcare has added support for the AcuNav intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) catheter to its Vivid i ultrasound scanner, and is launching the enhanced system at this week's Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics meeting in Washington, DC.
ICE is commonly used to guide percutaneous surgeries of structural heart abnormalities, such as repair of heart valves, patent foramen ovale conditions, and atrial septal defects, as well as for electrophysiology applications. ICE enables clinicians to visualize the heart from a different perspective and without the ionizing radiation of an angiography system.
Ultrasound vendor Acuson (now part of Siemens Healthcare of Malvern, PA) began shipping AcuNav in 2000, and in 2006 Siemens granted exclusive worldwide licensing rights to the technology to Biosense Webster of Diamond Bar, CA.
GE executives believe that the AcuNav catheter is a good fit for Vivid i, a laptop-sized scanner targeted at cardiovascular labs. The company said that it has sold over 5,000 Vivid i scanners, while AcuNav has an 80% share of the ICE market.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given GE 510(k) clearance to market AcuNav with Vivid i, and sales are beginning this week, the vendor said.
Related Reading
GE Healthcare posts mixed Q3 results, October 10, 2008
GE sells CodeLink unit, October 3, 2008
GE expands with two acquisitions, September 30, 2008
GE inks Bangladesh partnership, September 24, 2008
GE launches MRI oncology offering, September 22, 2008
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![Representative example of a 16-year-old male patient with underlying X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy. (A, B) Paired anteroposterior (AP) chest radiograph and dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) report shows lumbar spine (L1 through L4) areal bone mineral density (BMD). The DXA report was reformatted for anonymization and improved readability. The patient had low BMD (Z score ≤ −2.0). (C) Model (chest radiography [CXR]–BMD) output shows the predicted raw BMD and Z score in comparison with the DXA reference standard, together with interpretability analyses using Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) and gradient-weighted class activation maps. The patient was classified as having low BMD, consistent with the reference standard. AM = age-matched, DEXA = dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry, RM2 = room 2, SNUH = Seoul National University Hospital, YA = young adult.](https://img.auntminnie.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/04/ai-children-bone-density.0snnf2EJjr.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)
