GE HealthCare is presenting three new products for the radiation therapy segment: Intelligent Radiation Therapy (iRT), Auto Segmentation, and an updated MR radiation therapy suite (AIR Open Coil Suite). Each of these technologies, which will be showcased at the European Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ESTRO) 2023 Congress, were designed to help clinicians provide personalized care by enabling access to the diagnostics, technologies, and data needed to make informed and confident decisions.

Nearly two-thirds of cancer patients undergo radiation therapy, but the lengthy gap between diagnosis and treatment can negatively affect their prognosis. GE HealthCare helps address this challenge by accelerating the radiation oncology care pathway—an initiative that focuses on broadening the company’s imaging portfolio, accelerating workflows through enabling interoperability between radiation therapy systems, and helping clinicians choose the best technologies for their patients through an open, vendor-agnostic ecosystem.

GE’s new technologies include:

Intelligent Radiation Therapy (iRT) 

Radiation therapy patient workflow management is complex with various anatomy care pathways, multiple clinicians managing each patient, and several software applications and workflow systems that do not seamlessly share information. GE HealthCare worked with more than 150 clinicians globally to develop the new iRT platform, which enables greater interoperability, connectivity, and efficiency throughout the entirety of the radiation oncology care continuum. 

Key features include an integrated workflow that connects various applications into a single interface, multi-vendor interoperability that connects existing RT systems through an automated backend service, data transfer and task automation, and a catalog of RT applications from both GE HealthCare and third parties.

Current collaborators in the radiation therapy space include Accuray, Elekta, RaySearch, and 

Spectronic Medical.Additionally, the company has established the followingnew partnership to help drive clinical outcomes:

  • Sun Nuclear: A provider of quality management solutions for diagnostic imaging and radiation therapy centers worldwide. Its SunCHECK Platform standardizes workflows and centralizes data management for patient and machine quality assurance in radiation therapy, enabling increased departmental efficiency, improved treatment quality, and enhanced patient safety. The iRT ecosystem is slated for compatibility with SunCHECK Patient Software.

Auto Segmentation 

GE HealthCare is also streamlining the process of delineating organs at risk (OARs) with the introduction of Auto Segmentation. Delineation of OARs helps ensure a patient’s tumor receives the maximum dose of radiation therapy, while minimizing the exposure to surrounding tissue. However, the current manual process of delineating each organ on each CT slice can be time-consuming, with significant variability. 

Recently 510(k) cleared by the U.S. FDA and CE marked, Auto Segmentation is a deep learning, algorithm-based application that reads CT images and automatically contours and labels the OARs to accelerate this process and standardize its outputs. This algorithm is the latest example of GE HealthCare’s continued investment in artificial intelligence to build large foundational models to reduce the time needed to bring in new products and unlock untapped capabilities in CT.

An Updated AIR Open Coil Suite 

The AIR Open Coil Suite is a comprehensive imaging suite that plays a crucial role in the planning and guidance of radiation therapy. This advanced technology helps enable clinicians to characterize disease, plan treatment options, target tumors, preserve healthy tissue, assess response to therapy and improve patient comfort. 

To help provide increased patient comfort and procedure efficiency, it features the use of AIR coils and scan time that is reduced by up to 50%. The suite consists of three separate AIR coils designed for clinically beneficial signal-to-noise ratio, offers improved image quality that may reduce the need for repeat scans, and a new tabletop design that accommodates all necessary patient immobilization devices and eliminates the need to purchase a separate board.

“These new technologies may help transform the future of radiation therapy by optimizing and accelerating the oncology care pathway, as we know that is critical for the outcomes of patients battling cancer across the globe,” says Ben Newton, PhD, general manager, Oncology Solutions, at GE HealthCare. 

Newton adds, “We are streamlining the radiation therapy workflow by connecting currently disparate multi-vendor applications system, using artificial intelligence to automate complex manual steps like organ segmentation and minimizing the duration of advanced simulation procedures within MR, enabling a simplified process for providers and a reduced timeline to treatment for patients.”