Philips unveils new ultrasound system at ESC Congress 2014

Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA) today announced the launch of Affiniti, a new ultrasound system designed to enable global hospitals and health systems to overcome the demands of increasing patient volumes and cost pressures. Making its debut at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress 2014 in Barcelona this week, Affiniti provides innovative technology to help radiology/ultrasound departments facing more patients with fewer resources deliver high quality patient care.

"Affiniti was designed with the everyday challenges of healthcare professionals in mind," said Vitor Rocha, CEO and Senior Vice President of Ultrasound for Philips Imaging Systems. "We have leveraged more than 45 years of ultrasound innovation to deliver a reliable system that combines the excellent image quality our customers expect for fast, confident diagnosis, with advanced tools to help them improve efficiency and workflow and allow for the very best standard of care."

Built on the same architecture as Philips' ground breaking EPIQ ultrasound, Affiniti meets the needs of physicians who are challenged with treating large volumes of patients on any given day. Philips collaborated with hundreds of physicians around the world, who provided feedback to help inform Affiniti's ergonomic design, which led to an intuitive, easy-to-use system. Philips put the system through 4,500 hours of reliability testing with the demands of a busy medical practice and heavy workload in mind.

"With our high patient volume, cost pressures and throughput demands, my department/clinic/facility needs a system that offers high performance, a range of configuration options and low total cost of ownership while still offering superior image quality," said Dr. Martin Penicka, Cardiologist at the Cardiovascular Center Aalst, OLV Clinic, Aalst, Belgium.
"Philips Affiniti enables us to get to the level of detail we need to best serve our patients and enable our clinicians to keep up with increasing demand."

Officially unveiled today at the ESC Congress 2014, Affiniti will be showcased at the Philips booth (F500) from Saturday, August 30^th through Wednesday, September 3^rd. Key features include:

• Crisp, clear images that enable fast, confident diagnosis and reduce the need for additional exams;
• Philips' PureWave transducer technology, delivering excellent image quality with little or no need for image adjustment for technically difficult patients;
• Anatomical Intelligent Ultrasound, providing automatic anatomy recognition and quantification, making it easy to perform exams and quickly deliver new levels of clinical information;
• Automation tools such as AutoSCAN, Auto Doppler and SmartExam to reduce the number of steps required to complete each exam, resulting in enhanced workflow;
• DICOM and PC format capabilities to allow seamless information-sharing