CT System Features Intelligent Motion Correction for High Heart Rate Cardiac Imaging

Tackling the key difficulties of cardiac imaging--coronary motion, high heart rates, calcium blooming, plaque composition, and accurate myocardial perfusion, new computed tomography (CT) technology is designed to provide a new degree of cardiac CT performance and to help physicians provide better healthcare.

Announcing a recent advance in cardiac imaging, GE Healthcare (Chalfont St. Giles, UK) introduced the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 510(k)-pending Discovery CT750 HD FREEdom Edition at the opening of this year’s American College of Cardiology (ACC) annual scientific session and expo, held March 2012 in Chicago (IL, USA).

Discovery CT750 HD FREEdom Edition offers physicians capabilities that could modify the way cardiac CT imaging is performed. Based on exclusive FREEdom technologies (Fast Registered Energies and electrocardiography [ECG]), this innovative system represents a three-prong improvement upon traditional cardiac CT: (1) Motion FREEdom, with intelligent motion correction via SnapShot Freeze; (2) Calcium FREEdom, with enhanced coronary visualization using Gemstone Spectral Imaging (GSI) Cardiac; and (3) Horizon FREE opportunities, going beyond current clinical data with plaque material composition assessment and accurate perfusion calculations.

“FREEdom Edition has the potential to change the way we think about cardiac CT, both for the patient and the clinician,” said Dr. Jonathon Leipsic, head of radiology, Providence Health, St. Paul’s Hospital (Vancouver, BC, Canada). “By intelligently reducing motion artifact in CT images, SnapShot Freeze improves visualization, which is important for coronary artery interpretability.”

SnapShot Freeze, one of FREEdom’s breakthrough technologies, can help considerably reduce coronary motion and overcome the intrinsic limitation of all hardware-only solutions. By precisely detecting vessel motion and velocity, SnapShot Freeze can target actual vessel position and intelligently correct the effects of motion during cardiac CT exams.

The Discovery CT750 HD FREEdom Edition is also the first cardiac spectral imaging scanner that merges GE’s SnapShot Pulse technology with GSI’s fast kV switching allowing for a registered spectral CT dataset that is then decomposed into material density images and synthesized into monochromatic energies. For the first time, coronary images with calcium suppression are achievable for challenging patients with high calcium burden. Moreover, GSI Cardiac enables investigations into new possibilities for CT coronary plaque assessment and quantitative myocardial perfusion.

GE’s Discovery CT750 HD’s cardiac CT spatial resolution is an unprecedented 18.2 lp/cm. This improved resolution may help physicians make a more confident diagnosis and better quantify stenoses in coronary vessels by displaying reduction in calcium blooming compared to standard resolution.

GE Healthcare’s Discovery CT750 HD was included in the first ever fully positive recommendation from the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Diagnostic Assessment Program, which aims to ensure the National Health Service (NHS) can quickly and consistently adopt clinically and cost-effective technologies. NICE recommended the Discovery CT750 HD scanner as an option for first line cardiac imaging of the coronary arteries in people with suspected coronary artery disease.

“We believe the traditional challenges of cardiac CT are in large part beatable,” said Steve Gray, vice president and general manager for the CT and Advantage Workstation at GE Healthcare. “FREEdom Edition offers physicians a new tool to help overcome coronary motion, erratic heart rates, and various artifacts that stand in the way of a highly accurate, confident cardiac diagnosis in a variety of clinical settings.”

FREEdom Edition is built on the Discovery CT750 HD platform. Installed in hundreds of medical institutions worldwide, this system is powered by GE’s exclusive HD and low dose technologies, including GSI for lesion characterization and proven adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction (ASiR) dose-optimizing technology already used on over 10 million scans at 1,000 sites worldwide.

Discovery CT750 HD FREEdom Edition, GSI Cardiac, and SnapShot Freeze are FDA 510(k)-pending and not available for sale in the United States.

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