From the October 2021 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


“It’s unique to Varian,” Banner said. “We're testing to validate on our system.”

The company also plans to release version 1.7 of its Persona CT software in the fourth quarter of this year.


GE Healthcare
In November 2020, GE Healthcare announced the acquisition of Prismatic Sensors AB, a Swedish startup specializing in photon counting detectors.

The company acquired the technology in its pre-commercialization form, with plans to bring photon counting computed tomography (PCCT) to its scanners, said Sonia Sahney, chief marketing officer for molecular imaging and CT for GE Healthcare. The technology has the potential to allow visualization of smaller structures, improve tissue characterization, more accurate material density measurement and lower radiation dose,

“It is absolutely the future of CT,” Sahney said.

Also over the last year, GE expanded its Thoracic VCAR application, which provides automated lung segmentation and quantitative measurements in chest and lung scans, to improve lung and airway segmentations. There are also new presets for parenchyma analysis, helping to characterize and quantify areas of low and high attenuation within the lungs and disease patterns such as ground glass opacity or vascular dilatation, which may be present in patients with thoracic disease like pneumonia or COVID-19.

And a new version of the company’s FastStroke application was FDA cleared at the end of 2020. FastStroke automatically loads and processes CT studies, and sends the processed images in an email format, speeding up CT stroke evaluations.

The new version of FastStroke offers deep learning brain ventricle segmentation to prevent ventricular matter inclusion in quantitative results and improve visual inspection of the maps. It also provides tissue classification map segmented from absolute or relative values, customizable thresholds, and user selectable input maps.

Last year, the company expanded its TrueFidelity deep learning image reconstruction technology to dual-energy CT.

iCRco inc.
In March 2020, iCRco inc. introduced the Claris XT, a new large-format, 31-inch bore CBCT system. The scanner comes with 18-kilowatt tube, and a two-axis robotic table.

This new system and its software allows for high-resolution reconstructions of a volume of interest, said Stephen Neushul, president, chief executive officer and head engineer of iCRco.

“We’re trying to expand the functionality of CBCT,” Neushul said. “Most of its use has been for dental and extremities, because the sensors have been small. Now we’ve developed a large-format CBCT. Because it has a full-field sensor, you can do high-resolution imaging. With the robotic table, you can do long-length imaging with stitching. We essentially can do an entire spine with one device.”

October 2021 Magazine

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