Personalized Care from Disease Detection through Treatment Assessment Enabled with GE Healthcare’s Discovery IQ

June 9, 2014 — At the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) Annual Meeting, GE Healthcare introduced its Discovery* IQ^ PET/CT (positron emission tomography/ computed tomography) system enabling both outstanding image quality and intelligent quantitation, helping physicians to deliver the best possible patient outcomes.

Discovery IQ

Physicians not only want the ability to detect smaller lesions, but also the ability to determine earlier whether the patient is responding to current treatment. With the highest sensitivity in the industry (up to 22 cps/kBq), the largest axial field-of-view (up to 26 cm) and quantitative SUV measurements physicians can trust, Discovery IQ provides an essential tool to delivering personalized patient care. It enables physicians with the ability to see smaller lesions, scan faster with lower dose and improved image quality, read more efficiently and reach more patients.

“By 2020, it’s estimated that 50 percent of people will develop cancer at some point in their lives and we also know that currently approximately 70 percent of cancer patients do not respond to their initial chemotherapy treatment,” said Steve Gray, president and CEO of GE Healthcare MICT. “I’m excited to introduce the Discovery IQ to help physicians with their primary mission of delivering the best possible patient outcomes. And, we’ve focused on designing the system to make it as accessible as possible to more people in more places, to ensure high-performance PET/CT clinical care is available to whomever needs it.”

Some key innovative features of Discovery IQ include:

• GE Healthcare’s Q.Clear PET reconstruction technology, providing up to 2x improvement in both image quality and quantitation accuracy.
• A fully scalable system, allowing for the ability to upgrade as department needs change.
• This platform will be available also for the mobile market — enabling the latest technology across both fixed and mobile environments.
• The new platform design and the new LightBurst detector technology allow for whole organ imaging via fast scans at low dose to help maximize patient comfort and safety.
• Fast electronics and a dual acquisition channel that enables high quantitative accuracy for all clinically relevant tracers.

“As a leading U.S. academic institution with a strong international interest in oncology services, our mission is to provide high quality care to patients close to home,” said Charles Bogosta, president of UPMC’s international and commercial services division. “We are excited to see GE’s vision of quality, affordability and access so well aligned with ours in this regard.”

Q.Clear

GE Healthcare’s Q.Clear technology is a critical component of Discovery IQ. It delivers, for the first time, no trade-off between image quality and quantitative SUV measurements. By providing two times improvement in both quantitative accuracy and image quality in PET/CT imaging, this innovative new tool provides benefits to physicians across the cancer care continuum from diagnosis, staging, and treatment planning, to treatment assessment. Over the last decade, PET image reconstruction technology has been designed to provide better image quality, reduced acquisition time and lower injected dose. Current PET iterative reconstruction technologies, such as Time of Flight (TOF) and OSEM, force a compromise between image quality and quantitation. GE Healthcare’s new Q.Clear technology shows the advantage of full convergence PET imaging with no compromise between quantitation and image quality.

CortexID Suite^

CortexID software has been developed to aid physicians in the evaluation of patient pathologies via assessment and quantification of PET brain scans. The software aids in the assessment of human brain PET scans enabling automated analysis through quantification of tracer uptake and comparison with the corresponding tracer uptake in normal subjects. The resulting quantification is presented using volumes of interest, voxel-based or 3-D stereotactic surface projection maps of the brain. The package allows the user to generate information regarding relative changes in PET-FDG glucose metabolism and in PET brain amyloid load between a subject’s images and a normal database, which may be the result of brain neurodegeneration.

For more information: newsroom.gehealthcare.com

*Trademark of General Electric Co.

^ 510(k) pending at FDA. Not available for sale in the United States. Not for sale in all regions.