GE Kicks off Low-Dose Blueprint with 16-CT Sale to North Shore-Long Island

From the Center for Advanced Medicine at the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System in Success Lake, NY, GE announced Thursday a whopping 16-CT sale to the facility as a demonstration of the viability of its new low-dose facility blueprint. GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt described the company’s multi-million-dollar investment in technologies—like DoseWatch, an exposure monitoring system, and Veo CT, an image reconstruction process—that can lower the radiation dose of a chest exam from 10mSv to less than one. “For perspective,” a GE press release points out, “traditional chest CT scans can expose patients to anywhere from 5-10 mSv…and natural background radiation exposes the average American to around 3 mSv per year.” GE promised to share the strategies behind the North Shore blueprint with any health system, and will even offer the services of its consultants (dubbed “low-dose architects”) for free. “We think that in the GE installed base, we should be able to cut dose by 50 percent in the next three years,” Immelt . North Shore-LIJ President and CEO Michael Dowling described its purchase of 16 GE low-dose CT systems as “a major move forward” that guaranteed that every CT across the health system will be low-dose. “As you all know, there has been some concern over the years, especially recently…about the level of radiation with the ongoing, consistent, repeat use of CT imaging technology,” Dowling said. “We are resolving that issue here today by converting all of our technology to low-dose radiation.”