OREANDA-NEWS. June 10, 2015. Today at the Society for Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI), GE Healthcare is showcasing hybrid molecular imaging, magnetic resonance and nuclear medicine, systems aimed at: lowering dose; enhancing image quality to boost clinical confidence; and helping clinicians deliver more efficient, personalized care to increase diagnostic accuracy. GE Healthcare’s commitment to quantitative accuracy is realized with software innovations that enable clinicians to deliver personalized staging and disease assessments to patients.

Discovery IQ PET/CT with Q.Clear … half the time and half the dose

The Discovery* IQ PET/CT delivers, for the first time, no trade-off between image quality and quantitative accuracy. It also delivers Q.SUV, a quantitative SUV measurement, providing benefits to physicians across the cancer care continuum – from diagnosis and staging disease to treatment planning and assessment. Discovery IQ has the highest National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) sensitivity (up to 22 cps/kBq), the largest axial field-of-view (up to 26 cm) and the highest clinical Noise-Equivalent-Count-Rate (NECR) in the industry1. Discovery IQ can image with both half the PET dose and half the scan time2. Q.Clear technology is a critical component of Discovery IQ.

The Discovery IQ platform is fully scalable with upgradeable PET ring, ranging from a three to a five ring configuration. Health systems can upgrade their system after installation as clinical needs change, providing increased access to more people in more places to ensure high-performance PET/CT clinical care is available to patients.

“The Discovery IQ has helped improve the management of our patients,” said Mark Farnham, radiologist with Freeman Health Systems in Joplin, Mo. “With the Discovery IQ, we already notice very small, less conspicuous lesions that are now easily visible and we are able to diagnosis lesions with considerable ease that we wouldn’t have been able to see with our previous system.”

SIGNA* PET/MR enabling clinicians to reach new heights

GE Healthcare is proud to showcase the new SIGNA PET/MR, the world’s first time-of-flight (TOF) capable, integrated, simultaneous PET/MR system. This system represents a new chapter in helping clinicians achieve improved scanning efficiency that may lead to more effective treatment paths for patients, particularly in oncology, neurology and cardiology.

The SIGNA PET/MR features GE’s new, exclusive MR-compatible silicon photomultiplier detector (SiPM) technology. This new digital detector is characterized by its exceptional sensitivity and timing resolution of <400ps. TOF offers higher SNR while improving PET attenuation correction compared to non-TOF reconstruction systems. The remarkable sensitivity of 21 cps/kBq enables the potential for additional dose reduction or, alternatively, faster PET scans for the same dose. The SIGNA PET/MR is designed to be fully upgradable, on-site, from a Discovery MR750w 3.0T system.

Discovery NM/CT 670 Pro with Q.Metrix

GE Healthcare‘s Discovery NM/CT 670 Pro brings cutting-edge CT technology to nuclear medicine by integrating with GE’s Optima* CT540. The system combines a 50-slice equivalent CT speed for extended fast coverage of time-critical scans with advanced CT applications, dose management tools such as OptiDose*, DoseWatch* and ASiR*, and a streamlined workflow for challenging stand-alone CT procedures.

Discovery NM/CT 670 Pro also features GE’s Q.Suite for SPECT/CT, enabling quantitative accuracy with applications such as Q.Metrix that also uses Q.AC for very low dose Attenuation Correction. These applications may help clinicians gauge a patient’s progress accurately and optimize treatment, based on the patient’s unique response over time. Q.AC is an image reconstruction technique designed to help improve accuracy of SPECT attenuation correction enabling quantitative SPECT measurements, even at very low CT dose. Q.Metrix is designed to measure and report SPECT standard uptake values in the organ or lesion of interest enabling personalized, quantitative SPECT SUV results may be presented on multi-dimensional organs images.

Nuclear medicine is playing an increasing role in the diagnosis of disorders and in monitoring pediatric disease treatments. GE Healthcare is proud to showcase the Discovery NM/CT 670 Pro with Adventure Series, designed with pediatric patients in mind. The Adventure Series provides an unthreatening, playful “jungle”-looking environment as well as built-in entertainment system to help relax the patient and divert attention to encourage cooperation. Additionally, features such as ASiR, Q.AC and a pediatric pallet make this system an optimized solution for pediatric patients.

“I was pleasantly surprised by the consistent high image quality and effective dose management of the studies we acquired with the Discovery NM/CT 670 Pro,” said Professor Christian la Foug?re, MD at Tubingen University in Germany. “The Xeleris 3.1 [workstation] processing, review, and quantitation tools were both simple to use and flexible, enabling effective implementation of our clinical research plan.”

Quantifying ioflupane I123 images using DaTQUANT™

Also on display at the booth is DaTQUANT, a software tool meant for visual evaluation and quantification of iofluane I123 SPECT images. The application may assist in the detection of loss of functional dopaminergic neuron terminals in the striatum, which is correlated with Parkinson’s disease. DaTQUANT quantification capabilities are automated, reproducible, and accurate, to assist physicians in the proper diagnosis and care of their patients with Parkinsonism symptoms.

*Trademark of General Electric Company

1Comparing Discovery IQ 5-Ring to other PET/CT scanners reported in ITN online comparison charts (April 2014).

2Comparing Discovery IQ 5-Ring to a Discovery IQ 3-Ring.