Announcing a leap forward in advanced cardiac imaging, GE Healthcare
introduces the FDA 510(k)-pending Discovery CT750 HD FREEdom Edition
at the opening of this year's American College of Cardiology (ACC)
Annual Scientific Session & Expo in Chicago. Addressing the main
challenges of cardiac imaging - coronary motion, high heart rates,
calcium blooming, plaque composition and accurate myocardial perfusion -
the FREEdom Edition is designed to provide a new level of cardiac CT
performance and to help physicians best serve patients.
Discovery CT750 HD FREEdom Edition offers physicians capabilities that
could change the rules of cardiac CT. Based on exclusive FREEdom
technologies (Fast Registered
Energies & 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
today's clinical information 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 in
Vancouver. "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
significantly reduce coronary motion and overcome the inherent
limitation of all hardware-only solutions. By precisely detecting vessel
motion and velocity, SnapShot Freeze can determine 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 pioneering 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 possible for challenging
patients with high calcium burden. Additionally, GSI Cardiac enables
investigations into new horizons of CT coronary plaque assessment and
quantitative myocardial perfusion.
GE's Discovery CT750 HD leads the industry in cardiac CT spatial
resolution at 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 continued leadership in cardiac imaging was recently
highlighted when the 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 Programme,
which aims to ensure the National Health Service can rapidly 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 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 robust and proven Discovery CT750 HD
platform. Installed in hundreds of medical institutions around the
globe, 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.