GE Healthcare is making a $40 million, 100-job investment in its existing magnet resonance imaging components production operations in Florence County, South Carolina.

The GE move is aimed at solving “some of the toughest challenges in health care, as well as making an impact in our local communities where we live and work,” Florence plant manager Dale Wolf said in a statement.

“With companies like this one leading South Carolina’s manufacturing industry, there is no doubt that our state is going straight to the top.” added S.C. Governor Henry McMaster.

The expansion will build on the present 500,000-square-foot facility.

The workforce in the county was given credit for the company's decision to build there. Florence County Council Chairman Kent Caudle praised the community's “collaborative spirit and quality workforce.”

“This $40 million investment and the 100 new jobs it means for the Florence facility will make a real difference in the local community,” said South Carolina Senate President Pro Tempore Hugh K. Leatherman.

The MR market continues to grow. Valued worldwide at $5.45 billion in 2016, it is expected to hit $7.52 billion by 2021, with North and South America leading the way, according to a February Technavio report.

It is highly competitive for manufacturers, so many have gotten involved in strategic partnerships, mergers and acquisitions. In March, 2016, GE Healthcare partnered with Columbia University Medical Center to advance MR research.

In May, 2016, Siemens Healthineers partnered with Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals Case Medical Center to further develop MR Fingerprinting.

PET/MR hybrid imaging systems are becoming more popular as applications in breast and prostate cancer have been developed. A University of Michigan study published in July found that PET/MR improves the accuracy of image-guided prostate biopsies.

Also growing is the market for tele-imaging – of special benefit in remote regions of the globe. Research in this effort is building in both developed and developing countries including the U.S., Germany, Japan, India, Brazil and China.

“The introduction of fully automated, versatile, and easy-to-use imaging systems has led to the significant expansion of teleradiology and tele-imaging in remote areas,” Srinivas Sashidhar, a lead analyst at Technavio, said in a statement.

GE Healthcare has continued to advance the state-of-the-art. In September, 2016, it received FDA clearance for MAGiC, a multi-contrast MR technique developed in partnership with SyntheticMR AB that gives clinicians more data than conventional scans in a fraction of the time.

"MAGiC simultaneously provides a new level of protocol efficiency and tissue characterization," said Dr. Howard Rowley, professor of radiology, neurology and neurosurgery at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and president of the American Society of Neuroradiology, in a statement. "The flexibility to post-process a wide variety of key image families with different tissue contrasts from a single acquisition is groundbreaking."

Prior to approval, GE Healthcare had submitted a multi-center study to the FDA that showed that the image quality of MAGiC scans obtained on 1.5T and 3T systems at six facilities for 109 patients were comparable to conventional images — and produced in a fraction of the time.

“This study proves that this technique can improve the way clinicians conduct neuro scans and diagnose their patients," said Eric Stahre, president and CEO, GE Healthcare MR. "Neuro scans are approximately thirty percent of all MR scans; therefore MAGiC could have a tremendous impact on the MR community."

GE Healthcare is also making a major move into health IT. In February, HCB News spoke with its CEO John Flannery on the subject of HIMSS17.

At that time Flannery shared his thoughts on some of the future trends in health care and how GE Healthcare is positioning itself to be aligned with them:

“One of the impressions you’ll walk away with from our HIMSS discussions — and frankly our RSNA discussions as well — is that radiology and informatics are merging together,” he advised, adding, “I certainly see a path down the road where these aren’t two separate ideas and two separate shows, and it’s really the interplay of the equipment and the data and the analytics and how those combine to produce better clinical and economic outcomes. Our equipment business is aligning digitally with our IT business, so these things are becoming one and the same.”

He advised that his company is developing a platform to take advantage of these changes.

“General Electric has developed an industrial IoT (Internet of Things) platform called Predix,” he said, explaining that “this is a multi-billion dollar investment that we’re leveraging across the verticals inside of GE. Our particular aspect of that is GE Health Cloud.”

At HIMSS, GE Healthcare was “showing about 20 different workflow and workstation products across ambulatory care, financial management, clinical operations, etc.,” he said, adding that, “we have 13 apps that we’re going to show, five of which are commercially available and the rest are coming out. These apps are all about leveraging analytics for better clinical or economic outcomes.”