NEW ORLEANS - GE Healthcare of Waukesha, WI, is using this week's American College of Cardiology meeting to unveil its entrant in the next-generation multislice scanner race -- LightSpeed VCT, a 64-slice scanner.
LightSpeed CT features a 64-row detector that enables scanning at 64 x 0.625-mm slice widths, resulting in 40 mm of coverage in a single rotation. This pays off in a variety of applications, in particular for cardiac imaging, according to the company.
Coronary artery scans that previously took 20 seconds on GE's 16-slice scanner can now be conducted in 4-5 seconds. The extra slice count also helps address heart-rate variability issues that can confound older scanners.
One new application possible with LightSpeed VCT could be in imaging of emergency-room patients with chest pain, according to the company. The scanner's wider volume coverage enables ECG-gated scans of the entire chest, rather than just the heart. Thus clinicians potentially could rule out coronary artery disease, myocardial infarction, pulmonary embolism, and aortic dissection with a single scan, and enable patients suspected of having any of these conditions to be sent home rather than be held overnight for observation. GE plans to work with the first LightSpeed VCT beta sites to research this potential application.
LightSpeed VCT has a rotation speed of 400 ms, like GE's LightSpeed 16. The company plans to offer a version with 350 ms rotation in the future. And, by applying GE's SnapShotBurst Plus multicycle cardiac reconstruction algorithm, the system can achieve temporal resolution of 50 ms in cardiac studies, according to the company. The system uses the same Performix Pro x-ray tube available on GE's 16-slice model, and supports volume reconstruction at rates of 12 frames per second.
GE plans to begin installing LightSpeed VCT at beta sites this month and next. Commercial shipments are planned for the fourth quarter of this year. The system has received Food and Drug Administration 510(k) clearance.
In other modalities, GE is touting the launch of Innova 3100, a new flat-panel digital cardiovascular imaging system released just before the ACC show. Innova's 30-cm coverage area makes the system appropriate for both cardiac and peripheral vascular applications, according to the company. The unit slips in between the Innova 2000, a dedicated cardiac unit with a 20-cm panel, and Innova 4100, which uses a 40-cm panel that's best suited for angiography applications.
HeartFusion is a new dedicated cardiac image processing package for GE's Discovery line of PET/CT scanners. The software is the result of collaboration between GE and Emory University of Atlanta, and represents the further expansion of PET/CT into cardiology from its initial focus in oncology. It works by aligning anatomical images of the vascular coronary tree created by CT with 3-D functional data from PET. One application for HeartFusion is to quantify and analyze the impact of atherosclerotic lesions on the heart muscle.
On the information technology side, GE is talking up its Centricity 2.0 PACS system, which for the first time offers integrated cardiac and radiology image management within the same PACS network. First launched at the 2003 Symposium on Computer Applications in Radiology (SCAR), Centricity 2.0 began commercial shipments in January and there are now 10 integrated systems installed, according to the company.
In echocardiography, GE is giving ACC attendees a look at Vivid 4, which was introduced at the American Heart Association meeting in November.
In other ACC news, GE announced that it is contributing $530,000 to the ACC to fund a fellowship program for cardiologists who have recently completed their training. GE said the program is in response to comments from cardiologists that more training is needed in new imaging techniques that vendors are rolling out. Applications for the $65,000 fellowship positions will be accepted in May, with the first class of two fellows to start in the fall of 2005.
By AuntMinnie.com staff writersMarch 8, 2004
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