At this year’s Radiology Society of America (RSNA) annual meeting, GE Healthcare, a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) presented the new Innova® dose-efficient X-ray technology powered by the innovative GE AutoEx control system, which automatically and continuously adapts to help keep image quality and patient dose at optimum levels. The technology can reduce patient dose by as much as 40 percent without compromising image quality and is one of the first new-to-market product features validated under GE’s healthymagination initiative, dedicated to improving the quality, access and cost of healthcare.
Imaging with Innova® X-ray systems supports a variety of interventional procedures that help patients recover from disease and live fulfilling lives. As these procedures grow in complexity and length, minimizing exposure to radiation remains a priority. GE Healthcare offers the capability to potentially reduce dose by managing, customizing and personalizing radiation dose for each individual patient and procedure. The AutoEx system is available on Innova® 2100IQ, 3100 IQ, 4100IQ, 2121IQ and 3131IQ X-ray Systems.
“Minimizing radiation exposure while maintaining state-of-the-art image quality promotes high-quality patient care,” said Hooman Hakami, GE Healthcare’s President and CEO, Interventional Systems. “The industry as a whole is concerned about radiation dose, and we are incredibly proud of the scientific advances we’ve made with the introduction of the AutoEx system. Because of the potential for this technology to improve the quality of patient care by reducing dose exposure for patients, our Innova products have been validated under our healthymagination initiative. We are truly committed as a company to lowering cost, increasing access and – in this case, specifically – increasing quality of healthcare,” he said.
Healthymagination at work
High dose efficiency with Innova imaging allows clinicians to tailor each procedure, helping to optimize the dose for the patient’s needs or the procedure’s complexity without compromising image quality. Based on evidence supporting the potential for these products to improve the quality of patient care, the Innova family of products has been healthymagination validation by external independent experts from Oxford Analytica. GE launched healthymagination in May, which includes a $6 billion commitment from GE through 2015 to innovate smarter processes and technologies that help physicians and hospitals throughout the world provide a higher level of healthcare to more people – and save costs in the process.
Innova systems use a flat-panel detector that provides the industry’s highest Detective Quantum Efficiency (DQE), a parameter internationally accepted as the best index of detector performance in the contrast- and dose-limited imaging done in actual clinical studies. High DQE enables better-quality images at the same dose, or the same-quality image at a lower dose.
In addition, AutoExposure Preference Settings let physicians personalize image quality and dose. InnovaSense™ patient contouring further extends dose efficiency, helping to minimize detector-to-patient distance for fast positioning, excellent image geometry, and less radiation exposure.
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