GE announces new CT advances

Jun 12, 2006

Multimodality vendor GE Healthcare of Chalfont St. Giles, U.K., announced a raft of new technology developments in CT in advance of this week's International Symposium on Multidetector-Row CT in San Francisco.

First, the company reported that researchers at its R&D center in Haifa, Israel, have produced a "spectral CT" image using a new detector design. When dynamically acquiring energy data, the new detector counts each individual photon, which enables the system to capture more information based on position, type, and tissue characteristics.

GE believes spectral CT will enable CT to see beyond shades of gray and into photon counting, which could facilitate the separation of materials in stationary and moving objects such as calcium and iodine in coronary arteries. The technology has the potential for improved spatial resolution with lower x-ray dose. The Haifa researchers recently produced phantom images with the technology, and GE plans to install a research system at a clinical partner site in Israel, GE said.

In the next advancement, the company reported that researchers at Keio University in Japan using its existing 64-slice LightSpeed VCT technology have developed a method to acquire volume dual-energy images with a 50-cm field-of-view. GE believes the technique could give clinicians new clinical capabilities such as material decomposition (such as the separation of iodine and calcium) and simpler bone-vessel segmentation. The company believes the research could ultimately allow existing users to expand the utility of their VCT systems.

Finally, GE said that researchers at Kinki University Hospital in Japan have performed a dynamic CT angiography and full organ perfusion study in one scan without compromising physiological temporal resolution, in a technique the company called "Helical Shuttle." The technique dispenses with the concept that spiral CT scans must be performed at a constant table speed, or pitch, relative to slice thickness, according to the company.

Instead, Helical Shuttle enables the CT table to travel back and forth during scanning with real-time control, and enables Helical Shuttle to achieve wider coverage, of up to 120 mm longitudinally, providing whole-organ coverage. The technique could be used to perform a whole-organ angiographic and physiological assessment in a single scan, which GE is calling 4D CT angiography.

By AuntMinnie.com staff writers
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