The Biograph Horizon Flow edition PET/CT system is designed on similar technology to Siemens’ previously released high-end dual units, but it features a combination of design changes and technology enhancements to bring down the price.

“It’s got a slightly smaller bore size, fewer detector blocks and it’s air-cooled, rather than water-cooled, which helps reduce siting costs," Angela Bell, product marketing manager for Molecular Imaging, told HCB News.


According to Bell, the affordability of the unit is ideal for health systems that want to expand PET/CT capability from flagship treatment centers to community hospital locations.

The final Siemens Healthineers SNMMI product release centers around FDA clearance of the new release of syngo.via VB20 Molecular Imaging Software. This platform applies big data and artificial intelligence characteristics to calculate the tumor burden of a patient up to 30 times faster than manual calculations. This helps physicians and patients make better decisions about ongoing therapy. It can both improve treatments or offer better end-of-life decisions if the tumor burden is too great for successful treatment.

“Patients can have dozens of tumors, and this automated function helps physicians calculate the tumor burden – or likelihood of survivability or response to treatment – in a few minutes rather than hours, in some cases," Anatoliy Kalinovskiy, clinical marketing manager, Molecular Imaging told HCB News.

The syngo.via VB20 platform offers one-click calculations. It allows data point comparison from two points in time to provide insight into tumor progression. Also, the platform can provide a visualization and quantify patient uptake of certain radiopharmaceuticals for comparison to a database of other patients.

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