First-of-its-Kind All-Digital PET/CT System Enhances Diagnosis and Drives Efficiency

By MedImaging International staff writers
Posted on 18 Oct 2022

Image: Omni Legend is a first-of-its-kind all-digital PET/CT system (Photo courtesy of GE Healthcare)

A first-of-its-kind all-digital PET/CT system features an innovative, breakthrough technology built from the ground up to harness the power of an advanced digital detector capable of producing high-resolution images and exceptional image quality with enhanced clinical efficiency. The new PET/CT platform accommodates patients across more care areas and offers a scalable design to easily enable future-ready capabilities and multi-dimensional scalability. The new system is designed with a new deep learning image processing software and the flexibility to scan beyond FDG with new, emerging tracers that can enable different procedures such as the diagnostics portion of theranostics imaging

GE Healthcare (Chicago, IL, USA) has launched Omni Legend, the first system on its all-new, all-digital PET/CT platform. This cutting-edge system features a brand-new category of digital BGO (dBGO) detector material with a small crystal size that delivers more than two times the sensitivity of prior digital scanners, enabling faster total scan times and impressive small lesion detectability. It is designed to improve operational efficiency, enhance the patient experience, and increase diagnostic power, ideally helping to enable improved patient outcomes. Additionally, the system’s theranostics capabilities and ability to image short life tracers, as well as dynamic protocols, help empower clinicians with greater clinical information across more oncology, cardiology, and neurology procedure types than ever before.

Omni Legend aims to help healthcare systems overcome today’s barriers with a collection of intuitive workflow solutions enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI), including its new Precision DLi solution for deep learning image processing in PET/CT as well as its AI-based Auto Positioning Camera. More than a new processing technique, Precision DLi is engineered using Deep Learning with a sophisticated deep neural network trained on thousands of images created with different reconstruction methods. It was designed to provide the image quality performance benefits most associated with hardware-based Time-of-Flight, such as better contrast-to-noise ratio, contrast recovery, and quantitative accuracy. The capabilities of Omni Legend are further elevated by the inclusion of Q.Clear (BSREM), GE’s pioneering PET image reconstruction technology, and MotionFree, the company’s device-less respiratory motion correction technology. Q.Clear helps to ensure reliable quantification, while MotionFree operates seamlessly in the background to correct respiratory motion artifacts for all patient types.

Furthermore, the new system’s operational efficiency solutions help improve the PET/CT imaging experience for both the technologist and the patient with convenient features that provide a fast data quality assurance process that saves time with streamlined calibration; simplified protocol selection on the gantry touchscreen and a new user interface to enable an easy PET/CT process from start to finish; and enhanced patient positioning capabilities as a result of AI-based Auto Positioning that automatically centers the patient for a completely hands-free positioning experience. This streamlined patient setup frees up technologists to focus on making patients feel more comfortable.

Omni Legend also features LED ambient lighting to encourage a calming mood as well as a graphic pattern for the patient to view in the system to help in both alleviating stress and reducing movement for nervous patients. Omni Legend was designed with theranostics in mind, enabling clinicians to reach new levels of sensitivity and detectability for incredibly clear images. Already, the system boasts the highest sensitivity per cm in the market and images Gallium 68 for diagnosis, staging, or restaging. Future-ready capabilities include a multi-directional, upgradable platform that can potentially expand in each of the core dimensions of PET/CT imaging, including axial field-of-view, digital detector technology, software, CT capabilities, and imaging of new tracers.

“We built our scalable Omni platform from the ground up to meet the needs of our customers and their patients today and in the future,” said Jean-Luc Procaccini, President & CEO, Molecular Imaging & Computed Tomography, GE Healthcare. “With the patient in mind, we leaned on our longstanding technological leadership and strong clinical collaborations to enhance the scan experience with entirely new components designed to help improve clinical outcomes. The result is an all-digital detector, a cutting-edge deep learning solution, and workflow enhancements to help enable more personalized care.”

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GE Healthcare