GE Healthcare, the US $17 billion healthcare business of General Electric Company now offers the first-ever computed tomography (CT) scanner volume CT system capable of capturing images of the heart and coronary arteries in just five heartbeats. This reinforces GE Healthcare's leadership in CT technology and its commitment to bring safe and superior diagnostic imaging techniques to market with enormous benefits to patients, including earlier and more definitive diagnosis at very less radiation.
The innovative Volume CT XT system maintains outstanding image quality while reducing a patient's radiation exposure by up to 83 per cent for diagnostic cardiac scans. The six centres where this system will be installed are Sri Ramachandra Institute of Medical Sciences, Chennai, Clarity Imaging, Coimbatore, Global Hospitals, Hyderabad, Sahara Advanced Medical Institute, Lucknow, Vivus Diagnostics and Clumax Diagnostics, Bangalore.
The company introduced the LightSpeed VCT, the world's first volume CT system now with over 2,000 systems installed, capable of capturing images of the heart and coronary arteries in just five heartbeats. By building on the strong foundation of LightSpeed VCT, technologies such as SnapShot Pulse and VolumeShuttle offer healthcare professionals the opportunity to expand the clinical utility of their system.
"As leaders in CT, GE continues to focus on developing technologies that provide clinical excellence and outstanding image quality while reducing dose exposure for patients," said V Raja, president and CEO, GE Healthcare South Asia. "The LightSpeed VCT XT provides clarity, additional information and helps to generate confident physician diagnoses. Lowering dose is quite simply, the responsible thing to do and requires good partnership between manufacturers and radiologists".
"We believe this is an important advancement toward realizing GE's goal of 'early health,' shifting the paradigm from treating late stage disease to preventing it through early detection. With a ground-breaking technology like this, we will be able to usher in a new era of faster, accurate and safer diagnoses", added Raja.
Patient benefits are enormous, including earlier and more definitive diagnosis of occult coronary artery disease without the stress and cost of invasive arteriogram at substantial dose reduction compared to conventional CT scanners. "As a cardiologist I see multi-slice CT complementing the diagnostic workup of a cardiac patient. The outpatient procedure, quick diagnostic workup helps in better patient compliance. The added benefit of lower radiation dosage makes more and more cardiologists to adopt this technique. Superior imaging and short stay for the patient makes me predict that in future the CT Angio will become the preferred diagnostic work up modality and cardiac catheterisation laboratory will become more an interventional lab," said Dr SS Ramesh, Vivus Health, Bangalore.
"Six Indian customers have already selected the innovative technologies as their system of choice," said Naresh Narasimhan, general manager, CT, GE Healthcare.