VIENNA - GE Medical Systems launched an upgrade for its line of CT scanners at this week's European Congress of Radiology that the company says will result in much faster image processing and data transfer speeds. Called Xtream, the Waukesha, WI, vendor said the upgrade does for CT what the company's highly touted Excite upgrade did for MRI performance last year.
Xtream is based on a new scanner console platform that derives its performance boost from new data processing chips and other advances. The upgrade will help users deal with the rapidly growing datasets that are being produced by multislice CT scanners in a variety of applications, according to Camille Farhat, general manager of global CT product development and marketing.
For example, a scanner equipped with Xtream can currently reconstruct images at a rate of 6 frames per second, and that rate will be boosted to 15 fps by the end of the year. This will enable the reconstruction of a full cardiac CT study in less than one minute, a factor of 10 to 15 times what is currently available. GE executives pointed out that the reconstruction rate applies to all types of CT reconstructions, including data-intensive full-matrix scans with cone-beam reconstruction.
Xtream users will also be able to access image processing applications at any location in the department, Farhat said, whether they are accessing data from the scanner console, an image processing workstation, or a PACS workstation. Xtream includes a networking upgrade that is a factor of 10 faster than current 100BaseT technology -- further helping users transfer large datasets.
Xtream is available as an upgrade to GE's entire installed base of 3,000 LightSpeed scanners, ranging from 4-slice to 16-slice models. All new LightSpeed scanners will ship with the new scanner console, Farhat said. Xtream will begin shipping in the next 2-3 weeks.
By AuntMinnie.com staff writersMarch 9, 2003
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