GE Healthcare’s advances in imaging quantitation may help clinicians diagnose disease earlier

GE Healthcare shares a suite of advances in imaging quantitation that may help clinicians diagnose disease earlier, deliver more personalised treatment and speed up care at the 27^th annual meeting of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM), 18-22 October, in Gothenburg.

Valérie Brissart, Europe Regional Marketing Director MICT, says:

We strive to develop systems that meet the rising quantitation needs of our customers so that they can deliver better personalized care for patients. Improved outcomes are a priority to them.

GE Healthcare innovations on show at EANM this year include:

Discovery* IQ platform is a new PET/CT system increasingly sensitive to detecting small forms of disease and built to provide consistent SUV (standardised uptake value) measurements so you can trust what you see, making it an essential tool in providing personalized care from disease detection through treatment assessment. With the highest National Electrical Manufacturing Association (NEMA) sensitivity (up to 22 cps/kBq) and the largest axial field-of-view (up to 26 cm) in the industry¹, Discovery IQ can image with both half the PET dose and half the scan time². Discovery IQ offers smaller lesion detection with our new Q.Clear next-generation PET reconstruction technology. Q.Clear provides up to 2 times improvement in PET quantitation accuracy (SUVmean) and up to 2 times improvement in image quality (SNR). Delivering consistent quantitative SUV measurements enables fast and efficient reading for greater confidence in evaluating a patient’s response to cancer treatment.

Professor Frédéric Courbon from Institut Univeristaire du Cancer de Toulouse, France, where the Discovery IQ has been installed since July 2014, explained:

The Discovery IQ represents an important improvement for the management of our patients. This technology makes it possible to perform exams with increased PET sensitivity allowing us to reduce both the PET injected tracer dose and acquisition time. Combining this new generation of PET/CT system with Q.Clear allows us to obtain even better image quality with more accurate quantitative data.

GE Healthcare and Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, have established a partnership with the goal of improving the efficiency of the care pathway for pelvic cancer patients. GE Healthcare will be providing consultancy services, tools for healthcare analytics and a PET/CT imaging platform.  The use of PET/CT technology has a key role in the cancer patient pathway, from diagnosis, through to disease staging and treatment monitoring.

Discovery NM/CT 670 Pro, a nuclear medicine scanning system, integrates:

• Q.Suite quantitative package featuring Q.Metrix a user-friendly solution for measuring and reporting quantitative SPECT SUV results with multi-dimensional organ and lesion characterization, in a wide range of SPECT radiopharmaceutical. 

• The GE Optima* CT 540 for CT performance for a 50 slice equivalent CT speed
• Dose management tools such as OptiDose, DoseWatch*and ASiR*
• For scenarios where a diagnostic CT is not required, Q.AC can significantly reduce the CT radiation dose compared to a conventional CTAC exposure.  

SIGNA* PET/MR, recently CE marked for Europe, represents a new chapter in PET/MR. When you combine the two tools of PET and MR, clinicians may be able to see cellular changes before any anatomical changes could be observed. They can then fuse the anatomical images and biochemistry data together to pinpoint an area of cell growth, which may shorten the time between diagnosis and treatment.

SIGNA PET/MR features GE’s MR-compatible silicon photomultiplier detector (SiPM) technology, characterized by its NEMA sensitivity of 21 cps/kBq. This compact digital detector is also fast enough to enable TOF (Time of Flight) acquisition and reconstruction.

“We have a long history of collaboration with GE on new imaging technologies. Our research has focused on exploring the synergies of PET and MR, two very complementary techniques, and analysing how to best apply the strengths of each to patient care,” said Professor Philipp Kaufmann, MD from the University Hospital, Zurich. “Up until now the majority of patients we have examined have been for oncology exams. As one of three sites worldwide that have been using the system as a research scanner since January 2014, we are now excited, since CE marking in September, to extend its use by further exploring the potential for new applications in cardiology and neurodegenerative diseases.”

Uppsala University Hospital and Uppsala University in Sweden have recently completed the first installation of SIGNA PET/MR in Northern Europe and many research projects within oncological, neurological, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases are already planned. The University Hospital of Umeå in Northern Sweden is currently installing SIGNA PET/MR, in the hope of supporting more individualized and efficient cancer treatment and cancer research.

PET Chemistry Systems: GE Healthcare opens new areas in quantification with new PET tracers and FASTlab* Developer³. “With FASTlab Developer, we were able to easily optimize the different stages of the process and then transfer a reliable, simplified production procedure to multiple GMP production sites around the globe, accelerating the time between first development of a tracer and its use with the patient.” commented Sajinder Luthra, head of Chemistry and Radiopharmaceuticals for GE Healthcare.

GE Healthcare is also partnering with companies that are willing to develop and commercialize their own PET tracers as well as non-proprietary tracer solutions using FASTlab Developer. ABX Advanced Biochemical Compounds GmbH (“ABX”) will shortly put onto the market a solution to produce FDOPA tracer via a nucleophilic route using FASTlab platform.

“FASTlab was designed, using state-of-the-art technology combined with more than 20 years world class chemical, software, hardware and pharmaceutical expertise, to secure and boost PET tracer growth,” concludes Nigel Fry, Director, Chemistry Systems & Oncology, GE Healthcare.

* Trademark of General Electric Company

¹ Comparing Discovery IQ 5-ring to the other PET/CT scanners reported in ITN online comparison charts (April 2014).
² Comparing Discovery IQ 5 ring to a Discovery IQ 3 ring
³ GE Healthcare’s FASTlab Developer is not an approved medicinal product and is designed to support those conducting PET tracer development intended for investigational purposes.