GE Healthcare debuted its first all-digital PET/CT scanner, Omni Legend, on October 16 at the European Association of Nuclear Medicine Annual Meeting in Barcelona, Spain.

Designed to enhance theranostics, the solution has two times the sensitivity of prior digital scanners, allowing it to image high-count tracers for cardiac and neuro imaging, produce faster total scan times, with a greater ability to identify small lesions.

Other applications include its Precision DL solution for deep learning image processing; an AI-based auto positioning camera; Q.Clear for PET image reconstruction; and MotionFree, a deviceless respiratory motion correction solution.
“We have been able to increase patient throughput by more than a third thanks to the system’s fast total scan times — even achieving 35 patient scans in a 9.5-hour shift — and reduce dose by 40% versus the previous equipment that was installed,” said John Kennedy, chief physicist of the nuclear medicine department at Rambam Health Care Campus in Israel, in a statement.

Omni Legend has the highest sensitivity per centimeter in the market, due to a new category of digital BGO detector material with a small crystal size that doubles its sensitivity. It also has a 32 cm axial field-of-view and has up to a 2.2 increase in system sensitivity, compared to Discovery MI 25 cm, as well as a 53% reduction in PET scan time and 60% reduction in dose.

Among the tracers it can image are Gallium 68 for diagnosing, staging and restaging diseases. "Clinicians and patients are especially seeing much success with theranostics in prostate cancer – a highly manageable disease, but one that is difficult to treat when diagnosed at a late. Omni Legend’s ability to image Gallium 68 is an important enabler in healthcare systems ability to adopt theranostics practices into their day-to-day operations now and in the future," Erez Levy, general manager of molecular imaging at GE Healthcare, told HCB News.

Its Precision DL application facilitates different reconstruction methods, aligning the image quality with hardware-based Time-of-Flight and leading to better contrast-to-noise ratios, contract recovery and quantitative accuracy.

Q.Clear quantifies results, while MotionFree corrects respiratory motion artifacts for all patient types. Additionally, the solution’s fast data quality assurance process saves technologists time on streamlining calibration, while simplified protocol selection on the gantry touch screen and a new user interface make the PET/CT process simpler.

The AI-based auto-positioning centers the patient without having to touch them, and LED lighting provides a calming mood and a graphic pattern for the patient to view to relieve stress and reduce movement. As a result, the technologist can focus on making patients comfortable.

Future potential capabilities include a multidirectional, upgradable platform that can potentially expand in axial field-of-view, digital detector technology, software, CT capabilities, and imaging of new tracers.

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