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GE Healthcare
Introducing Q.Suite
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The value of PET/CT in diagnostic
imaging has been established
for years — but now, even brighter
possibilities are coming to light.
With new quantitative tools that
generate more consistent PET
measurements, clinicians can
now assess treatment response
more accurately than ever before.
As a result, clinicians can forge
a bold new treatment paradigm:
personalized care.
It’s all about finding the most
effective treatment sooner, based
on each patient’s response. It’s
the future of PET/CT. And the tools
within Q.Suite are designed to
help make it a reality.
Together with our customers,
we are focused on improving
cost, quality and access in
PET imaging — a smarter path
to tomorrow’s care.
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Personalized care: Effective treatments, tangible results
During the course of cancer treatment, clinicians
traditionally gauge progress by looking for physical
change in the size of a tumor, typically using CT or MR.
But with quantitative PET imaging, they can also
consider metabolic activity. Often times, metabolic
changes in a tumor can be perceived more quickly than
physical ones, so quantitative PET can give physicians
an earlier view of how well a treatment is working.
This is the key to personalized care. By getting answers
sooner, clinicians can modify treatment strategies
without waiting for physical results, potentially
increasing the chance of an effective therapy. More
effective therapy may help improve your patient’s
quality of life and overall outcome as well as reduce
the cost burden of ineffective treatment.
For quantitative PET to be effective, clinicians need
consistent SUV measurements between a patient’s
baseline scan and subsequent follow-up scans on a
single scanner. Variation can occur throughout the
PET workflow, in areas from patient management and
biology to equipment protocols and performance.
Controlling these variables to increase consistency
can help improve your confidence that an SUV change
has true clinical meaning.
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Q.Suite:
Breakthrough tools
for quantitative PET
With so much potential for variation, each
part of the workflow must be addressed
for quantitative PET to be effective. So
we’re designing Q.Suite to help improve
consistency in every key area: daily
quality control, scanner workflow, motion
correction, reconstruction algorithms, and
analysis and reporting applications.
Developed in collaboration with leading
researchers, Q.Suite represents the next
step in GE Healthcare’s vision to enable
effective quantitative PET imaging. Its nextgeneration tools span the workflow today —
and they provide a foundation for further
advancement tomorrow.
Count-Rate Independent
Performance
Great performance at any
count rate
To make consistent quantitative measurements, reconstruction parameters must
be matched to the system’s acquisition
performance. If performance is variable
with count rate, reconstruction parameter
mismatches can lead to quantitative
variation. But because our PET/CT product
acquisition performance is not dependent
on count rate, it can maintain consistent
quantitation across all types of tracers, scan
modes, and patient sizes.
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The use of PET in therapy assessment is
already proven and effective. But by
combining the capabilities of Q.Suite with
updated clinical practices, we believe
the consistency of PET measurements
can increase dramatically. The goal:
more personalized care to help raise the
standard of care for all patients.
Real-Time Temperature
Compensation
Consistent performance. Every
exam. Every temperature.
The temperature of a scan room can
affect the performance of a PET scanner,
causing mismatches between current and
calibrated system settings. Our real-time
temperature compensation feature takes
temperature measurements in every
detector at the start of each exam, automatically adjusting the performance settings
for any temperature change. This helps
ensure that the system produces consistent
measurements throughout the day.
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Q.Core
Accelerating your quantitative
imaging workflow
The processing needs of Q.Suite are more
sophisticated than PET/CT has seen before.
So we’re updating our core computing
hardware to handle the job. Q.Core is
designed to manage both PET acquisition
and reconstruction processing at faster
speeds — in a compact footprint.
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Q.Freeze
One image. All the counts.
Motion eliminated.
We’re designing Q.Freeze to combine the
quantitative benefits of 4D phase-matched
PET/CT imaging into a single static image.
By collecting CT and PET data at each phase
of the breathing cycle, then matching the
data for attenuation correction purposes,
Q.Freeze is designed to facilitate quantitative
consistency. None of the acquisition data
is wasted, as 100% of the counts collected
are combined to create a single static image.
The goal — a resulting image that has the
dual benefit of frozen patient motion and
reduced image noise.
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Q.Check
A quality control link between the
scanner and workstation
Data capture is an important component
to quantitative PET— and an incomplete
set of parameters can cause frustration in
the reading room. Q.Check is designed
to provide an additional level of quality
control, establishing a link between the
console and workstation. This connection
can help ensure that all the patient and
exam data you require for quantitative
imaging is saved in the patient file before
the exam is finished. By capturing relevant
parameters and physiological factors,
Q.Check will bring both reliability and
confidence to the reading room.
Q.Static
Reducing organ motion effects,
quickly and simply
Q.Static represents a starting point for
adding basic motion correction techniques
to your facility and the opportunity to build
towards a full 4D phase-matched workflow.
Without disrupting your standard static
whole-body workflow, we’re designing
Q.Static to automatically isolate data when
organs are in a low motion state, thereby
correcting for motion across the entire
chest or torso. The result is a single image
series with reduced blurring from organ
motion, and therefore more consistent
quantitation compared to a static image.
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Within Q.Suite,
eight capabilities
from GE Healthcare
work together to
drive quantitative
consistency.
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PET VCAR
Powerful patient monitoring
Visualizing and analyzing disease and
Q.AC
Attenuation consistency for
demanding clinical protocols
Accurate attenuation correction is required
for quantitative PET imaging. But in large
anatomy imaging at low doses, the CT
beam may not be strong enough to fully
penetrate through the patient to the
detector, potentially resulting in variations
in attenuation measurements. Our nextgeneration Q.AC algorithm is designed to
reduce potential variance, helping to
ensure that the attenuation coefficients
used in image reconstruction are accurate.
This may improve consistency even in the
most clinically demanding circumstances.
treatment response requires powerful tools.
PET VCAR provides automated, interactive
access to valuable quantitative information,
managing multiple lesions and multiple
patient exams over time following the most
popular treatment response assessment
protocols available in PET/CT imaging,
including PERCIST. It has the potential to
improve the clinicians’ daily reading
experience and patient management.
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GE Healthcare’s
PET vision:
A smarter path
Together with our customers, we are
focused on improving cost, quality and
access in PET imaging — a smarter path
to tomorrow’s care. With Q.Suite, that
smarter path means:
Responsible care.
Q.Suite is designed to help physicians
assess therapy response early and
effectively, allowing oncologists to modify
treatment strategies without waiting for
physical results. More effective therapy
may improve your patient’s quality of life
and overall outcome as well as reduce
the cost burden of ineffective treatment.
Meaningful collaboration.
Q.Suite is the product of close, ongoing
partnerships between technology leaders
and clinical researchers. We learned
about the challenges of quantitative PET
from our customers and are developing
Q.Suite with their help. We will continue on
this path, bringing tools to clinicians to
help them drive toward a new standard of
patient care.
Sustainable advancement.
We are building Q.Suite on a platform
that can support ongoing development in
the future. It will constitute an important
step forward in capturing consistent
quantitative measurements, and we will
continue to invest in quantitative imaging
tools in the years to come.
As we pursue a smarter path with our customers,
GE Healthcare is committed to the future of PET/CT.
While we never cease to break new ground, our
priority is clinically relevant advancements that can
help improve the lives of patients.
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About GE Healthcare:
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies
and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our broad
expertise in medical imaging and information technologies,
medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery,
biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, performance
improvement and performance solutions services help our
customers to deliver better care to more people around the world
at a lower cost. In addition, we partner with healthcare leaders,
striving to leverage the global policy change necessary to
implement a successful shift to sustainable healthcare systems.
Our “healthymagination” vision for the future invites the world
to join us on our journey as we continuously develop innovations
focused on reducing costs, increasing access and improving
quality around the world. Headquartered in the United Kingdom,
GE Healthcare is a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE).
Worldwide, GE Healthcare employees are committed to
serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more
than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare,
visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com.
©2012 General Electric Company — All rights reserved.
General Electric Company reserves the right to make
changes in specifications and features shown herein, or
discontinue the product described at any time without
notice or obligation.
GE. GE Monogram, and imagination at work are trademarks
of General Electric Company.
*Trademark of General Electric Company
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