GE Healthcare announced today that it has received clearance from U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the company's next-generation volume PET/CT application to help clinicians diagnose, stage, treat and monitor tumors and other lesions in the body. The new software application, PET VCAR (Volume Computer-Assisted Reading), will be showcased at the 45th annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, June 2-6, in Washington, D.C.
"PET VCAR offers a new dimension in quantitation for tumor response management, said Dr. Seza Gulec, nuclear oncologist, Goshen Cancer Center in Goshen, Indiana.
The FDA clearance includes a GE-patented Interactive Data Analysis (IDA) tool, which allows physicians to systematically track treatment over time and quantitatively interpret a patient's response to therapy. The new IDA capability facilitates informed, objective treatment decision-making by automating several previously manual processes and presenting data in an organized, user-configurable format.
"PET VCAR is a full-body treatment, response and management tool for PET/CT imaging, which supports objective clinical decision-making by providing logical quantitative data, ultimately leading to accurate and personalized treatment," said Kelly Piacsek, Ph.D., global oncology product manager for GE Healthcare. "The Interactive Data Analysis feature provides a tumor report card allowing physicians to systematically visualize, analyze and manage tumors over time with unparalleled efficiency. We believe PET VCAR will help improve the clinicians' daily reading experience and patient management."
PET VCAR offers several innovative workflow enhancements for both single- and multi-exam review, including exam-to-exam auto-registration, tumor segmentation and quantification, and multi-planar image review.
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.