GE Healthcare debuted its Discovery IQ Gen 2 this weekend at the SNMMI 2019 Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California.

An advanced version of Discovery IQ, the PET/CT system is lighter and thinner than its predecessor, and equipped with software and hardware upgrades for greater personalized care. Among its features is MotionFree, which prevents blurring in images due to respiratory motion.

“If you take a picture of a car moving, and the motion can create a blur, you won’t know what the exact size of the car is. It’s the same if you have misdiagnosed a lesion in the lung, diaphragm or pancreatic area due to blurring from respiratory motion. You won’t know where to target your treatment,” Nimalan Paul, global product manager for PET/CT, told HCB News. “This technology will automatically detect and correct for respiratory motion, so you get to see an image without motion.”
MotionFree does not require a gating device, instead seamlessly integrating with existing workflows for each patient to monitor respiratory motion in the background of every procedure. It also provides real-time respiratory analysis and a graphical interface for retrospective scanning, providing up to a 30 percent improvement in quantitative accuracy and up to 67 percent improvement in lesion volume measurements.

The 70-cm bore can perform scans in 10-15 minutes and delivers the industry’s highest NEMA sensitivity, along with improvements in quantitation accuracy. In addition, its remote landmarking feature enables technologists to remotely adjust the positioning of the table from inside the console room, saving them time in preparing for exams and reducing their exposure to radiation.

“The more time they spend with the patient, the more dose exposure there is. Now they don’t have to spend so much time,” said Paul. “They greet the patient, put them on the table and go back into the console room where they can remotely position and adjust the table.”

Additional new offerings include a Medium Energy High Resolution and Sensitivity (MEHRS) collimator designed for Indium-111 and Lutetium-177 imaging on GE’s cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) general purpose SPECT/CT systems; and an expansion of its PETtrace cyclotron capabilities in combination with its FASTlab 2 Developer to now produce 68Gallium for increased theranostic capabilities.

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