by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | October 15, 2018
From the October 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
The company also recently released the CardioGraphe, a dedicated cardiovascular CT system. The scanner images the heart, coronary arteries and vascular structures and it can be used for structural heart procedures like transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR).
“Facilities might not be able to afford top-of-the-line general purpose scanners,” Schubert said. “It is more of a middle price point with top-of-the-line performance for cardiovascular applications.”
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The CardioGraphe is aimed at radiology practices with a high number of cardiac cases or imaging centers that want to set up chest pain management clinics, as well as for cardiology practices and in the cath lab.
“This is taking CT for the first time in a point-of-care setting, which is, of course, more comfortable for patients who have minor chest pain,” Schubert said. “Making the system more affordable in an outpatient setting is really the goal.”
Since RSNA, GE has also released three new advanced clinical applications to improve diagnosis and accelerate workflow for CT.
The first, GSI Fat, is a fat quantification tool to determine whether a patient is susceptible to fatty liver disease, which is a precursor to liver cancer.
“Fat has been demonstrated to be very useful to show patients who may be pre-symptomatic,” Schubert said. “The gold standard has been MR in the past, but that is not for a broad population of patients.”
GE also released a physician visualization tool for 4D myocardial perfusion scans that Schubert said can “image the heart in one heartbeat, but also scan the heart over time and see perfusion of the myocardia.”
The third new application is for planning minimally-invasive mitral valve replacement procedures. The application is similar to GE’s aortic valve replacement planning tool, which evaluates the insertion point, makes sure the valve won’t dislodge any plaque and ensures that the size of the valve is adequate.
In the last year, GE also began offering what it calls Smart Subscription, which provides access in the cloud to the latest software updates for a facility’s entire fleet of CT scanners.
“This keeps all your scanners and software applications up to date with the latest upgrade subscription for the applications,” Schubert said.
