GE Healthcare Backs Whole-Body Imaging PET/CT Collaboration

GE Healthcare is backing a molecular imaging partnership between artificial intelligence (AI) and medical image processing company Quibim and several other molecular imaging partners to create a total-body PET/CT scanner for simultaneous whole-body imaging.

This $8.9-million project includes Full Body Insight, a total-body PET technologies company, and Oncovision, a molecular imaging equipment specialist, and it is partially funded by the Valencia Government Health Project in Spain.

According to project leaders, this High Sensitivity Molecular Imaging Project is designed to develop new PET applications for biomedical research. The goal is to increase axial coverage to improve sensitivity to enable dose reduction and truncate acquisition time without degrading image quality. These advancements will directly benefit pediatric patients, as well as those who need repeated scanning, project representatives said.

In addition, improvements to axial coverage will also enable dynamic acquisitions of main organs, project leaders said.

Quibim’s role, according to company representatives, is to provide whole-body segmentation to perform automatic quantification of PET images.

“We will create automatic pipelines to obtain a virtual in vivo dissection of key organs using AI and characterize radiotracer and radiomics features,” said Angel Alberich-Bayarri, Quibim’s chief executive officer and co-founder. “The output of this innovative collaboration will help clinicians reading a PET exam decide on which regions they must focus on to support patient diagnosis and prognosis evaluations.”

Project leaders anticipate the prototype system will be available in 2023.