GE Healthcare Introduces Omni Legend: A First-of-its-Kind All-Digital PET/CT System to Drive Efficiency, Enhance Diagnostics

The first system on its brand-new, entirely digital PET/CT platform, Omni Legendi, is proudly unveiled by GE Healthcare at the European Association of Nuclear Medicine Annual Meeting. This state-of-the-art device uses an entirely new class of digital BGO detector material with a small crystal size that yields more than double the sensitivity of earlier digital scannersii, enabling quicker total scan timesiii and outstanding minor lesion detectabilityiv. It is intended to increase diagnostic power, improve operational efficiency, and improve the patient experience, thus enabling better patient outcomes.

Furthermore, the system’s theranosticsv capabilities, ability to scan short-lived tracers, dynamic protocolsvi, and other features give clinicians richer clinical information than ever before across a wider range of cancer, cardiology, and neurology operation types.

“Sensitivity and image quality are everything in PET/CT,” explains John Kennedy, Ph.D., Chief Physicist, Nuclear Medicine Department, Rambam Health Care Campus, and Lecturer at Technion – Israel Institute of Technologyvii. “Omni Legend delivers on both – meeting all our image quality criteria for oncology and providing impressive sensitivity to image high count tracers for cardiac and neuro imaging, which helps better inform patient diagnoses and monitoring. Also, 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. This not only enables better patient access and experience but also allows us to increase overall hospital efficiencyviii.”

As the pace of change in healthcare continues to increase, health plan leaders cite managing costs and driving operational efficiency as the top two challenges they face todayix. This is consistent with comments by global Molecular Imaging departments, which note operational efficiency as a top barrier to growing PET/CT procedure volumesx.

Omni Legend is GE Healthcare’s response to these growing challenges, helping 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.

According to Prof. Zohar Keidar, Director of Nuclear Medicine & the PET/CT Department at Rambam and Associate Clinical Professor at the Technion Faculty of Medicinevii, “having access to high-quality pictures to determine patient care is crucial to giving great healthcare.” In light of this, a department with a strong workload like ours needs a system that allows flexibility for emergency situations on top of our already full calendars. This flexibility is provided by Omni Legend. We were able to raise our daily patient scan volume by 150 percent, from 30 to 45, in only a few short weeks or months. When something urgent arises, we can now rapidly scan a patient while continuing with our other appointments, as opposed to the lengthy wait list we once had. Additionally, the clinical protocols of the system give us more flexibility by enabling us to stage patients on any scanner, independent of the system they were previously scanned on, giving us new fleet management opportunities

Precision DLi was developed utilising Deep Learning with a powerful deep neural network trained on millions of images made using various reconstruction techniques, which is more than just a new processing method. The benefits of higher contrast-to noise ratio, contrast recovery, and quantitative precision most frequently associated with hardware-based Time-of-Flight were the driving forces behind its construction.

The addition of Q.Clear (BSREM), GE Healthcare’s ground-breaking PET image reconstruction technology, and MotionFree, the company’s tried-and-true, device-free respiratory motion correction technology, enhances Omni Legend’s capabilities even further. While MotionFree works invisibly in the background to eliminate respiratory motion artefacts for all patient types, Q.Clear aids in ensuring accurate quantification.

Additionally, the new system’s operational efficiency improvements aid the PET/CT imaging experience for the technician and the patient by providing practical features including.

• 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.