GE Healthcare today announced 510k clearance of CoreScan - a widely-accessible application dedicated to quickly and accurately quantifying visceral adipose tissue (VAT), or visceral "belly" fat, during body composition analysis. Hosted on GE Lunar's iDXA body composition system, CoreScan provides patients and physicians an advanced tool to quantify VAT in order to help assess, manage, and treat obesity-related disease.
"CoreScan offers instant, precise and reproducible fat-quantifying results that go beyond the bathroom scale," said Laura Stoltenberg, general manager of GE Healthcare's Lunar business. "As part of an iDXA body composition exam, CoreScan can help patients and physicians tailor individualized health and wellness plans while addressing the growing global danger of obesity-related disease."
With the number of obese individuals worldwide nearly doubling to more than half a billion over the last three decades, global healthcare spending on obesity-related disease is climbing. Medical care related to obesity costs the United States roughly $168 billion annually, or more than 15 percent of national healthcare spending. The swelling cost of obesity-related disease makes it vital that patients and physicians have access to a VAT-quantifying tool like CoreScan.
VAT is fat that surrounds abdominal organs. While VAT levels may not correlate with an individual's waist size or weight, excess VAT levels are linked to obesity, which has been shown to increase the risk of Type 2 Diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia and other diseases.
"Quantification of visceral fat with a practical, patient-friendly application like CoreScan would transform our ability to accurately evaluate, treat and monitor patients," said Steven B. Heymsfield, MD, Executive Director of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. "This technology can also advance research and clinical approaches for overweight and obesity evaluation by providing improvements over existing clinical tools."
Kimchi found to significantly reduce body fat and combat obesity