GE HealthCare and UCSF are partnering to develop what GE HealthCare’s Erin Angel called “the imaging center of the future.” [Photo courtesy of University of California, San Francisco]
GE HealthCare is researching how advanced medical imaging technologies can improve the diagnosis and treatment of patients with cancer, neurodegenerative diseases — and anyone else who could benefit from more informative, more accessible medical scans.
After GE HealthCare — the world’s seventh-largest medical device company — recently announced a new research partnership with University of California San Francisco (UCSF), Medical Design & Outsourcing spoke with GE HealthCare VP of Research and Scientific Affairs Erin Angel about how medical imaging advances can improve patient care. Her team leads research collaborations with healthcare providers and external scientists related to GE HealthCare technologies of the present and the future, working with engineering teams within the medical imaging developer’s business segments.
“We’re working with those teams to do on-the-ground science,” Angel said in an interview. “That might be anything from FDA trials to evidence generation on existing technology.”
One example is GE HealthCare’s Magnus magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, which is giving researchers finer spatial resolution for neuroanatomy than they’ve ever had before.
“We’re working with key collaborators utilizing this technology to see how seeing more in the human brain can help us in lot of fields,” she said. “In medical, that’s brain cancer or vascularity within the brain, psychology and pain imaging, or if you have inflammation, can you see something different in the brain? None of these questions are answered, but these are the sorts of things we’re looking at with that high-precision instrumentation.”
One of the goals of the UCSF partnership is increasing MRI automation for better standardization of care and increased access to care.
GE HealthCare Global VP of Research and Scientific Affairs Erin Angel [Photo courtesy of GE HealthCare]
“The smarter these machines are, the more you can scale access to that high image quality,” she said. “You don’t need the very most expert technologist at every single community hospital across the country and globe. … With remote access, you can get to a point where your expert or your coach at a primary hub can assist the technologists at community hospitals that are related to that healthcare institution, bringing that same level of care. They don’t have to drive all the way to the hub hospital for a complex case.”
Imaging automation will require new software to improve image quality by detecting the pause between a patient’s breathing or to tell when a patient’s heart is in the systolic phase of the cardiac cycle, Angel said. But imaging automation will also require cameras to ensure patients are accurately positioned for not only the best image quality, but also for safety by minimizing radiation exposure.
Angel said the No. 1 challenge for GE HealthCare imaging customers since the start of this decade — the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — is workflow. She identified several factors, including the backlog of cases due to COVID-19 interruptions, as well as the aging baby boomer generation.
“We’re hearing from our customers [about] progression of disease, more advanced disease at the point that the patient enters into the healthcare system,” she said. “And of course, radiology or imaging is really key when it comes to more advanced disease, both diagnosing and figuring out the right triage for more complex healthcare situations.”
“All of this together, along with the ‘Great Resignation’ of 2020 and 2021 definitely hit healthcare, as it did many other industries,” she continued. “It was a really hard industry to work in, and there was a lot of loss of talent. So there’s not quite the talent there to support the workflow or the flow of patients. [We’re] helping our customers with that need by streamlining every time they touch our equipment or every time they touch our technologies, keeping it as streamlined and lean — that’s the word we like to use at GE — as possible.”
Advanced medical imaging for neurodegenerative diseases and cancer
GE HealthCare defines theranostics as “the use of one radioactive drug to diagnose and a second radioactive drug for
treatment, both targeting the same cancer cell receptor.” [Image courtesy of GE HealthCare]
Another goal of GE HealthCare’s imaging innovation partnership is to improve diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Positron emission tomography (PET) scanning flags the plaque in the brain that causes Alzheimer’s, helps doctors determine which drug is best for that particular patient, and tracks the disease progression before and during the use of that drug. While a patient is being treated, MRI scans can monitor patients for safety risks like brain hemorrhage.
“It’d be really nice if we could combine those into one modality,” Angel said. “We do have a PET MR, so … could we pull all of that diagnosis and tracking and triage for Alzheimer’s into a single modality?”
The advanced imaging researchers also have cancer in their sights with precision medicine. Current PET scanning technology allows for radioactive tracer injections to identify cancer in a patient. But theranostics (a combination of the words therapy and diagnostics) can not only identify cancer but kill it using a similar combination of imaging and tracers that could spare healthy tissue. Theranostics is already used for prostate cancer, for example.
“Long term, we’re really optimistic about the potential of theranostics for patient care in cancer,” Angel said.
Advice for other device developers
Asked for any advice she would offer to device developers and manufactures, Angel encouraged them to “be practical and understand the whole picture.”
“I’m a physicist,” she said. “I love widgets, I love really cool technology, but what I’ve learned in my career is to understand the whole picture and how that technology would really be used in the clinical space, how it would be reimbursed, where the money flows, who would actually pay for it, who would actually receive the funding, really understanding the whole business case. Because having cool technology is not enough.”
“Even having MABs (medical advisory boards) to make sure you’re hearing from doctors is not enough,” she continued. “You really have to be side by side with the physicians or ultimate users of the technology to understand how it’s going to look in the real world, and you don’t want to get too far or too invested into something and then find out you missed something really obvious, which I’ve seen way too many times.”
The researchers at UCSF are the “clinical [and] scientific voice” of the collaboration with GE HealthCare, she said.
“We have the opportunity through this to work with really cutting-edge scientists at UCSF in neuroscience, in MR and in precision medicine — in theranostics — and a lot of what we can do partnering with them, we could never do without them,” she said. “… We have the opportunity to impact a lot of cancers around the world, and seeing how we can accelerate that development and positively impact patients is really exciting.”
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