United Imaging Healthcare exhibited at its first Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) meeting this week in Anaheim, CA, demonstrating PET/CT and PET/MRI systems, as well as its flagship whole-body PET scanner.
United has been receiving clearances for its product line in the run-up to SNMMI 2019 and is now "fully operational," according to CEO Jeffrey Bundy, PhD. The company's molecular imaging product line includes the following:
- uMI 550 is a PET/CT system with an 80-slice CT component and a PET module with a 24-cm field-of-view.
- uMI 780 is a PET/CT scanner that features 160-slice CT and PET with a 30-cm field-of-view.
- uPMR 790 is a high-definition PET/MRI scanner with 32-cm PET field-of-view. Clearance for the system was announced in May.
- uExplorer is a total-body PET/CT system with 2 meters of patient coverage. Clearance for uExplorer was announced earlier this year.
With clearances in hand, United has been building its U.S. sales and service workforce with the intention of selling directly to hospitals and imaging centers rather than using distributors. The company is also building a 100,000-sq-ft facility in Houston, where it intends to manufacture some systems that currently are being built in China.
Perhaps generating the most buzz at SNMMI 2019 is uExplorer, which is being developed in collaboration with the University of California, Davis. uExplorer uses eight rings consisting of a half-million PET detectors that line the system's bore; it is designed to detect pathology at far lower levels of disease activity than currently possible -- with scan times of less than one minute.
uExplorer total-body PET/CT system. Image courtesy of United Imaging Healthcare.A commercial uExplorer system manufactured in China was shipped to UC Davis and installed just recently, with the first human images acquired on June 21, according to a presentation in the Hal Anger Lecture on Monday at SNMMI 2019 by project collaborator Terry Jones. Researchers at Zhongshan Hospital in Shanghai have acquired 100 human images with a system installed there, Jones said.
