GE HealthCare begins manufacturing in Wisconsin its fastest-selling PET/CT, installs 100th system in the U.S.

• GE HealthCare’s Omni Legend encourages the adoption of innovative imaging technologies to help advance precision care
• The Waukesha-based Omni Legend manufacturing line will produce and deliver GE HealthCare’s latest positron emission tomography / computed tomography (PET/CT) technology to healthcare systems and clinicians throughout the United States and Canada for sensitive, high-resolution imaging that helps promote early diagnosis and precision monitoring of therapeutic responses for optimized patient treatment planning
• PET/CT represents a valuable imaging solution used broadly for diagnosis, staging, therapeutic planning and treatment response assessment that integrates digital processing with artificial intelligence (AI) to provide valuable insights that inform clinical decision-making, helping drive better outcomes for patients

WAUKESHA, Wisconsin — Today, GE HealthCare is proud to announce that its 100th Omni Legend digital PET/CT installation in the United States and Canada will take place “up the road” at the newly completed UW Health Eastpark Medical Center in Madison. Additionally, less than a year after joining the Wisconsin BioHealth Tech Hub, GE HealthCare is advancing its mission to strengthen the region’s personalized medicine innovation and manufacturing ecosystem with the first North American production line for the system in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

A uniquely scalable solution, Omni Legend is designed to evolve and help meet growing healthcare system demands across care areas, including striking image quality in oncology, an ability to accommodate the anticipated increase in PET amyloid imaging volume related to Alzheimer's diagnosis in neurology, and impressive imaging of a variety of cardiac tracers, including fast decay tracers and new tracers in cardiology. 

Medical imaging is a crucial tool for diagnosing disease, identifying a course of treatment, and determining whether therapy is successful for millions of patients in the U.S., Canada, and around the world. Image quality matters — to the clinician and the patient — making the difference between finding a small lesion early or in its later stages, potentially affecting patient outcomes and disease management. For this reason, clinicians are increasingly adopting imaging and AI-based solutions for enhanced image quality compared to that of standard care.

With the evolution of medical research, particularly in oncology and neurology, early diagnosis and treatment capabilities are expanding at a rapid rate. Many of these diagnostic and tracking protocols rely heavily on medical imaging, which means we have seen a dramatic rise in demand for PET/CT platforms and services, as well. Expanding the capabilities, efficiency and accessibility of these platforms is therefore essential to ensuring patients can receive cutting-edge and timely care.  

With these conditions in mind, GE HealthCare will now manufacture Omni Legend at its Waukesha facility, supporting the Wisconsin BioHealth Tech Hub's mission to lead in personalized medicine. This initiative, designated and funded by the US Department of Commerce and led by BioForward Wisconsin, leverages the state's healthcare assets to expand manufacturing, data sharing, and lab space while advancing breakthroughs in genomics, imaging, and big data analytics to meet future demands in theranostics and personalized care.

“We are committed to enabling the broad adoption of precision care across care areas and practice of more personalized medicine, including theranostics,” shares Jay Hill, Vice President, Advanced Technology, GE HealthCare. “Individualizing patient care and advanced diagnosis and therapies can help put patients on the right path, sooner — all with the goal of improving patient outcomes. Already, our Waukesha facility supports these efforts as a vital founding partner in the Wisconsin BioHealth Tech Hub for the development, production and delivery of next-generation imaging technology to increase diagnostic applications. Our team is working with the Tech Hub to support our shared goals of integrating of digital tools and individualized datasets from patients with these new technologies to take personalized medicine to a whole new level, and with the help of clinicians throughout the United States and Canada, increase the yield and value of diagnostics. Now, we are incredibly proud to include Omni Legend among the list of impressive technologies coming from the site.”

GE HealthCare’s Omni Legend PET/CT utilizes an innovative, high stopping power, digital detector system for more than two times the sensitivity of prior digital scanners,[i] enabling faster scan times,[ii] and impressive small lesion detectability.[iii] With the reduced scan times and optimization of image quality, this system helps to address the increasing demand for imaging by enabling shorter scan time for higher patient throughput. Additionally, the technology’s ability to image tracers for the practice of theranostics[iv], as well as dynamic protocols,[v] helps empower providers with greater clinical information across more procedure types than ever before.

Furthermore, GE HealthCare is driving this progress with advanced AI-powered technologies that provide clinicians with precise data, helping clinicians to identify the best treatments for each patient. By delivering timely insights, these innovations aim to help improve patient outcomes and enable more personalized, data-driven care. On Omni Legend, this includes intuitive solutions enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) to help encourage greater image quality and operational efficiency:

• Precision DL: A revolutionary deep learning-based image processing software that provides the image quality performance benefits typically associated with hardware-based Time of Flight (ToF) reconstruction, including improved contrast-to-noise ratio, contrast recovery,[vi] and quantitative accuracy.[vii]
• Innovative AI-based Auto Positioning: Automatically detects an anatomical landmark by deep learning algorithms and allows minimizing positioning action into a single click operation, which is an 80% reduction of click numbers compared to the manual operation.[viii] With this technology, it is a high possibility for it to limit the time for patient positioning significantly compared to traditional manual operations, deliver consistent image quality, improve patient safety, and reduce the likelihood of CT over exposure.

For more information about GE HealthCare’s Omni Legend PET/CT and involvement in the Wisconsin BioHealth Tech Hub, please visit gehealthcare.com.

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[i] Omni Legend 32 cm has up to 2.2 increase in system sensitivity as compared to Discovery MI 25 cm. Measurement follows NEMA NU 2-2018.

[ii] Up to 53% reduction of PET scan time on Omni Legend 32 cm compared to Discovery MI 25 cm, as demonstrated in phantom testing.

[iii] Omni Legend 32 cm increases small lesion detectability 16% on average and up to 20%, as compared to Discovery MI 25 cm with matched scan time/injected dose, as demonstrated in phantom testing using a model observer with 4 mm lesions; average of different reconstruction methods.

[iv] Omni Legend is capable of imaging the diagnostics portion of theranostics

[v] For dynamic protocols such as Whole Body Dynamic Acquisition, the Dynamic IQ processing application is required..

[vi] Precision DL with Omni Legend 32cm data improves Contrast Recovery (CR) by 11% on average and Contrast-to-Noise Ratio (CNR) by average of 23% as compared to non-ToF reconstruction. CR and CNR demonstrated using clinical data with inserted lesions of known size, location, and contrast. Using data from Omni Legend 32 cm, CR and CNR were measured using High Precision DL and QCHD.

[vii] Precision DL with Omni Legend 32cm improves feature quantitation accuracy by 14% as compared to Discovery MI with ToF reconstruction, at comparable noise level. Quantitation accuracy demonstrated using clinical data with inserted lesions of known size, location, and contrast (ground truth). Feature SUVmean from Omni Legend 32 cm with High Precision DL compared to SUVmean from Discovery MI 25 cm with QCFX.

[viii] Single click operation may reduce the time for patient positioning significantly compared to traditional manual operations.