GE Healthcare today announced it has received clearance from the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration for the company’s
new 3.0T magnetic resonance (MR) scanner, the latest addition to GE’s
Signa family of MR systems. The new Signa®
MR750 3.0T was introduced at the International Society of Magnetic
Resonance in Medicine in Toronto, May 3-9.
Equipped with the industry’s most powerful
gradients, easy-to-use workflow features and the company’s
advanced Thermal Management System, the Signa MR750 delivers up to 60
percent additional anatomical coverage and resolution unit per time. The
system also allows for up to five times the imaging performance over
previous generations, increasing the freedom for advanced application
development, including: a routine liver exam in 15 minutes and a full
breast exam in only two sequences.
“GE is committed to pushing the boundaries for
MRI capabilities and we believe this new product will do that now and in
the future,” said Jim Davis, vice president
and general manager of GE Healthcare’s MR
business. “We expect this product to be a
robust and clinically capable MR system that will simplify MR exams
without compromising quality or productivity.”
The Signa MR750 features a newly designed RF Transmit system maximizing
performance with a 17 percent gain in scanning efficiency. In addition,
the system includes the GE-exclusive Optical RF Technology that adds up
to 27 percent higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over conventional,
non-optical MR receivers by reducing electrical noise and increasing
signal detection.
When combined with GE’s use of high-density
surface coils, the optical receive chain is a critical path for ensuring
clear signal reception and data analysis. To ensure that the
high-density approach will always be maintained, the Signa MR750 3.0T
architecture is scalable to 128 channels of simultaneous data
acquisition.
Revolutionizing imaging capabilities with new parallel imaging
technique
In efforts to improve full-body imaging on 3.0T MR, GE Healthcare’s
Signa MR750 features a newly developed parallel imaging technique
entitled ARC™, Auto Calibrating
Reconstruction for Cartesian imaging. In addition to reducing specific
absorption rate (SAR), the ARC technique also improves body imaging by
allowing:
Auto-calibration that helps avoid collecting external sensitivity map;
Less sensitive to field-of-view (FOV) positioning with a tight FOV;
Clinically practical reconstruction times for continuous scanning; and
Workflow simplification that can be seamlessly integrated into
sequences without the need for separate calibration scans.
As a result of this new imaging technique, the MR 750 also features new
operational efficient advanced applications, including:
LAVA-IDEALTM
LAVA-IDEAL is a dual-echo acquisition technique that raises the bar on
existing sequences to provide consistent, detailed, three-dimensional
abdominal images in one breath-hold. By allowing the user to select the
output image types-- in-phase, opposed-phase, water and fat-- LAVA-IDEAL
has the ability to produce four image contrasts with only one scan. With
this new 3.0T application, clinicians can now conduct a complete liver
exam in 15 minutes.
“LAVA-IDEAL is a robust sequence that offers ‘fat
only’ and ‘water
only’ images in addition to excellent
in-phase and opposed-phase images in a single breath-hold. This sequence
has quickly become a routine part of all our abdominal sequence
protocols at 3.0T,” said Dr. Elmar Merkle,
professor of Radiology, Head of Body Magnetic Resonance Imaging and
Medical Director of the Center for Advanced Magnetic Resonance
Development at Duke University.
VIBRANT-IDEALTM
VIBRANT-IDEAL is a new application that allows for fat-free breast
imaging with high spatio-temporal resolution. This application catches
the shortest in- and out-of phase echoes to keep scan times comparable
to single echo acquisitions even though twice the amount of data is
collected.
VIBRANT-IDEAL optimizes acquisition with a high signal-to-noise ratio
(SNR) for acquiring high quality water and fat images. This capability
lets the user prescribe thinner slices for high spatial resolution
imaging.
PROPELLER 2.0
PROPELLER 2.0 enables strong performance in all neuro imaging planes
with the implementation of the No Phase Wrap (NPW) technique. NPW allows
virtually ghost-artifact-free, motion-immune scans in sagittal, coronal,
axial and oblique planes. Since this technique effectively deals with
the aliasing artifact, PROPELLER 2.0 is now more robust performing small
field-of-view (FOV) scans.
Simplification of user interface, patient experience and automated
acquisition and processing
Driven by customer demands for improved clinical capabilities, the Signa
MR750 has been designed around clinical workflow needs with a strong
focus on improving productivity, With that in mind, the system also
includes operational efficiencies such as the newly designed detachable
patient table and the first ever in-room operator console.
In addition, The Signa MR750 features automated acquisition based on the
concept of touch and go protocols. The aspect of the system allows for
more focused attention on the patient and consistent protocols and
processing across operating technicians.
Together, these features reduce setup time in the scanner room by up to
71 percent and additionally, the newly designed user interface reduces
the number of steps by as much as 68 percent.
“MR users told us that they want to be able
to provide the most advanced clinical applications to serve their
communities, such as a complete liver exam in a 15-minute slot, routine
fMRI with shorter paradigms and greater activation and a complete breast
exam in only two sequences, but they need to be able to reproduce these
exams very quickly and easily – every time,”
said David Handler, general manager of global MR marketing. “The
Signa MR750 puts the most powerful MR technology at their fingertips to
use in a very simple way so they can focus on patients.”
About GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and
services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in
medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics,
patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and
biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians
around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat
and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.
GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare
providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease,
neurological diseases and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the
future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on
earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease
prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17
billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE
Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving
healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries.
For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com.
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