WASHINGTON - New enhancements and upgrades to its PET/CT and SPECT product lines mark the exhibit booth of GE Healthcare of Chalfont St. Giles, U.K., at this week's SNM meeting.
GE is touting PET VCAR, a volume computer-aided reading application that received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance earlier this year. Workflow advancements available on VCAR include exam-to-exam autoregistration, tumor segmentation and quantification, and multiplanar image review.
For PET brain imaging, GE is highlighting Cortex ID, a software application on the company's Advantage Windows workstation and PET/CT console that was developed by GE and the University of Washington in Seattle. The software received FDA clearance last year and was shown at the 2006 RSNA meeting.
The software identifies a patient's metabolic changes in comparison to a database of age-matched normal subjects, and checks for abnormalities indicative of brain function alterations by neurodegenerative processes. The resulting data uses 3D stereotactic surface projection maps of the brain to allow for quantitative visualization of patterns and severity of abnormalities, GE said.
In SPECT imaging, Evolution for Cardiac is a method for reducing the length of myocardial perfusion studies by half while improving image quality, according to the company. The technique is available on the company's Xeleris nuclear medicine workstation.
Evolution for Cardiac is compatible with GE's Hawkeye CT attenuation correction technique for Infinia gamma cameras, and uses an evolution resolution recovery method -- rather than filtered back projection -- that was developed for both gated and nongated technetium-based SPECT studies. The technique improves the positional accuracy of imaging through 3D modeling of the collimator-detector response function, GE said.
In milestone news, GE announced that it has shipped the 1,000th unit of its Infinia gamma camera. The milestone installation comes less than four years after the system's product launch.
In its Technology Pavilion showcase of futuristic technologies, GE is demonstrating a work-in-progress SPECT camera with cadmium zinc telluride digital detectors. The system is being developed to conduct fast dynamic studies, the company said.
On the radiopharmaceutical side, TracerCenter-GMP is a new version of the company's TracerCenter radiopharmacy module that includes support for FDA rules on good manufacturing practices (GMPs) for radiopharmaceuticals. TracerCenter-GMP includes PET radiopharmacy equipment, documentation, and GMP training and consulting services.
Meanwhile, TracerLab FX C Pro is a new platform for the production of carbon-11 radiotracers.
By AuntMinnie.com staff writers
June 6, 2007
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