OREANDA-NEWS. November 16, 2012. GE Healthcare Canada announced Health Canada clearance of its new cardiac imaging platform, the Discovery* CT750 HD FREEdom Edition. Addressing the main challenges of cardiac imaging – coronary motion, calcium blooming, plaque composition and accurate myocardial perfusion – the FREEdom Edition is designed to provide a new level of cardiac CT performance.

Discovery* CT750 HD FREEdom Edition offers physicians capabilities that are designed to overcome some of the current limitations of cardiac CT. Based on exclusive FREEdom technologies (Fast Registered Energies & ECG), this innovative system represents a three-prong solution to the challenges in traditional cardiac CT: (1) Motion FREEdom, with intelligent motion correction via SnapShot* Freeze; (2) Calcium FREEdom, with enhanced coronary visualization using Gemstone* Spectral Imaging (GSI) Cardiac; and (3) Horizon FREE opportunities, going beyond today's clinical information with plaque material composition assessment and information for accurate perfusion calculations. Click on the link here to learn more about the FREEdom Edition.

SnapShot* Freeze, one of FREEdom’s innovative technologies, can help significantly reduce coronary motion and overcome some of the limitations of all hardware-only solutions. By precisely detecting vessel motion and velocity, SnapShot* Freeze can determine actual vessel position and intelligently correct the effects of motion during cardiac CT exams. Engineering evaluation of SnapShot* Freeze intelligent motion correction has demonstrated that SnapShot* Freeze can achieve a 58msec Equivalent Gantry Rotation Speed, which is 4 to 6 times faster than gantry rotation speed alone. This translates to a 29msec Effective Temporal Resolution which achieves a Cardiac CT temporal sampling similar to the frame rate of a cath lab.

“FREEdom Edition has the potential to significantly improve coronary artery imaging with CT,” said Dr. Jonathon Leipsic, Head of Radiology, Providence Health, St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. “By intelligently reducing motion artifact in CT images, SnapShot* Freeze improves visualization, which may allow for reduction in the number of non-interpretable segments and increases reader confidence of CCTA.”

HD FREEdom’s first U.S. installation at the University of Washington follows approximately two dozen installations in Europe and Japan where physicians are currently using SnapShot* Freeze and GSI Cardiac in routine practice for coronary evaluation, and pushing the horizons of Cardiac CT in plaque composition and myocardial perfusion assessment.

The Discovery* CT750 HD FREEdom Edition is also the first Cardiac Spectral CT scanner that merges GE’s pioneering SnapShot* Pulse technology with GSI’s fast kV switching allowing for a registered spectral CT dataset. Spectral CT takes CT beyond anatomy to create images of quantitative material density, which can then be synthesized into monochromatic energies. Monochromatic images have key advantages in virtually beam-hardening artifact free images, and improved contrast-to-noise at a given dose. And “Calcium FREEdom” means that, now coronary images with calcium suppression are possible for challenging patients with high calcium burden. Additionally, GSI Cardiac enables investigations into new horizons of CT coronary plaque assessment and quantitative myocardial perfusion.

GE’s Discovery* CT750 HD leads the industry in cardiac CT spatial resolution at 18.2 lp/cm^. This level of resolution helps physicians make a confident diagnosis and accurately quantify stenoses in coronary vessels by displaying reduction in calcium blooming compared to standard resolution.

GE Healthcare’s continued leadership in cardiac imaging was recently highlighted when the Discovery* CT750 HD was included in the first ever fully positive recommendation from the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Diagnostic Assessment Programme, which aims to ensure the National Health Service can rapidly and consistently adopt clinically and cost effective technologies. NICE recommended the Discovery* CT750 HD scanner as an option for first line cardiac imaging of the coronary arteries in people with suspected coronary artery disease.

“We believe the traditional challenges of cardiac CT are in large part beatable with a smarter software and electronic approach,” said Peter Robertson, Vice President and General Manager for GE Healthcare, Canada. “FREEdom Edition offers physicians a new tool to help overcome coronary motion, and various artifacts that may stand in the way of a highly accurate, confident cardiac diagnosis in a variety of clinical settings.”

FREEdom Edition is built on the robust and proven Discovery* CT750 HD platform. Installed in hundreds of medical institutions around the globe, this platform is powered by GE's exclusive HD and low dose technologies, including GSI for additional information for aiding in lesion characterization and proven Adaptive Statistical Iterative Reconstruction (ASiR) dose-optimizing technology already used on over 20 million scans at 1,800 sites worldwide+.

* Trademarks of General Electric Company.

^ Based upon internal test data comparing Discovery* CT750 HD cardiac half-scan spatial resolution to data from Advanced CT Scanners for Coronary Angiography, ImPACT Report CEP10043, March, 2010 available at http://impactscan.org.

+ 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 physicist should be made to determine the appropriate dose to obtain diagnostic image quality for the particular clinical task.