The U.S. FDA has cleared a new artificial intelligence solution from GE HealthCare, used for enhancing the quality of PET/CT images, the company announced Tuesday.
Precision DL processing software offers benefits typically seen in hardware-based “time of flight” reconstruction. Those include improved contrast-to-noise ratio, contrast recovery and quantitative accuracy.
“We can’t treat what we don’t see, which is why we require precise image quality to help diagnose, plan treatment for, and monitor disease,” Flavio Forrer, MD, PhD, chairman of nuclear medicine at Kantonsspital St. Gallen in Switzerland, said in a May 30 announcement from GE. “Precision DL enhances image quality—enabling us to spot small lesions, including on images obtained with very low dose injections and short bed times, to potentially start treatment and monitoring early, which might result in improved patient outcomes.”
Precision DL was engineered using a deep neural network, trained with thousands of images created via multiple reconstruction methods. A May 2022 study in the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging concluded that the technology produced improvements in feature quantitation, overall image sharpness and diagnostic value.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.