GE Brings Molecular Imaging Into Treatment Planning Arena

Main Category: MRI / PET / Ultrasound
Also Included In: Radiology / Nuclear Medicine;  Cancer / Oncology
Article Date: 03 Nov 2007 - 3:00 PDT

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GE Healthcare's next-generation volume PET/CT application is stepping beyond helping clinicians diagnose, stage, treat and monitor tumors and other lesions in the body. As demonstrated at today's opening of the 49th annual meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiation and Oncology in Los Angeles, PET VCAR (Volume Computer-Assisted Reading) is equally valuable for Radiation Therapy planning.

"PET VCAR optimizes tumor management, enabling early quantification and understanding of treatment effectiveness for precision treatment planning," said Gene Saragnese, vice president and general manager of Molecular Imaging and CT Business at GE Healthcare. "But it also is being used to measure the effectiveness of that treatment by identifying, delineating and quantifying areas of metabolic activity in PET/CT scans and, through its advanced registration capability, for quick comparison of tumor response over time."

PET VCAR complements GE's approach to personal patient management and the need to assess each patient individually. Now, with PET VCAR, GE's suite of Oncology applications, including Lung VCAR, Advantage4D, AdvantageSim MD and 4Dx, spans the patient management spectrum from early health to disease management. The Discovery family of PET/CT scanners is further enhanced by PET VCAR, which provides easy access to valuable quantitative information over time, allowing efficient image assessment and tumor response management.

"As PET/CT plays a larger and larger role in treatment planning and monitoring," said Dr. Landis K. Griffith, National Medical Director for PET, US Oncology, Dallas. "The tools provided by PET VCAR promise dramatic improvements in workflow for both imaging and treating physicians, and offer a great step forward in providing objective and reproducible data for both patient management and clinical trials."

Dr. Seza Gulec, Nuclear and Surgical Oncologist with the Goshen Center for Cancer Care, Indiana, added his enthusiasm regarding the technology's capabilities in the field of oncology, calling the development "a new dimension in quantitative imaging for tumor response management."

PET VCAR offers several innovative workflow enhancements for both single- and multi-exam review, including exam-to-exam auto-registration, tumor segmentation and quantification, and multi-planar image review. Built from over 5 years of experience with advanced volume quantification applications for computed tomography, PET VCAR technology complements the vast portfolio of oncology imaging technologies and applications offerings across GE Healthcare's Molecular Imaging and Computed Tomography Business.

"PET VCAR has the potential to improve the way PET/CT images are used in clinical follow up," said Hadi Moufarrej, General Manager of GE Healthcare's Global Molecular Imaging Business. "The GE-patented Interactive Data Analysis (IDA) feature provides a tumor report card allowing physicians to systematically visualize, analyze and manage tumors over time with tremendous efficiency. We believe PET VCAR will help improve the clinicians' daily reading experience and patient management."

About GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at http://www.gehealthcare.com.