St. Luke’s University Health Network recently announced a $30 million investment in CT technology from GE HealthCare that will give St. Luke’s patients access to some of the most sophisticated, cutting-edge technology on the market.
This approach taken by GE HealthCare and St. Luke’s will help provide St. Luke’s with access to the latest CT technology, helping to extend the life of these devices and helping ensure a more consistent experience for patients no matter where they go for their St. Luke’s care. Additionally, these scanners will have a comprehensive suite of clinical applications, as well as the latest in Artificial Intelligence (AI), in a platform that seamlessly connects and integrates with the existing St. Luke’s network.
Patients now can have additional benefits during their CT exams including: faster scans and sharper images (when compared to previous CT systems), a potential reduction in radiation dose from advancements in technology, the capacity to better detect lesions or tissue abnormalities and to map vascular structures, and the ability to capture fine detail in the head and neck, which is critical in stroke diagnosis.
The scanners are also expected to be helpful within St. Luke’s pediatric patient population, trauma cases, and especially in advanced cardiac exams by using GE HealthCare’s SnapShot Freeze technology. That technology, combined with fast rotation speed and wide coverage provided by the GE HealthCare scanners, provides the ability to image the heart with any heart rate in just one beat, which reduces the motion artifacts significantly, thus decreasing the likelihood for additional scanning.
In effect, this new technology allows for a quicker, more informed and more accurate diagnosis, with less inconvenience to patients, according to Dr. David Furman, medical director of computed tomography, St. Luke’s University Health Network. From an administrative perspective, the new GE HealthCare equipment provides a CT that evolves and has consistent capabilities across all sites within the St. Luke’s network, with a single set of capabilities to learn, operate and read.
The process of bringing this cutting-edge technology to St. Luke’s began about 18 months ago, according to Furman, who also serves as the chief of radiology at the St. Luke’s Upper Bucks Campus, which will be the first location in the country to have this new equipment installed. In addition to a market need for CT cardiac imaging, the new St. Luke’s Upper Bucks Campus had the building infrastructure already in place to physically support the new equipment, Furman said. The full deployment of the fleet of advanced CT scanners across the network is expected to be fully complete within four years.
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