by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | July 22, 2014
From the July 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Patricia Venters, chief marketing officer for ultrasound at GE Healthcare, says Scan Assistant was developed with experienced and new stenographers. It’s an “intelligent” program that mimics users’ scanning sequences and helps reduce keystrokes.
Philips, which was virtually tied with GE in the KLAS report for its iU22 ultrasound, has products with various degrees of automation of steps, which enables clinicians to get more predictability.
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“The benefit of that is you get high-quality outputs more consistently,” Says Sean Gallimore, vice president of global ultrasound marketing for Philips. “It reduces the amount of steps and the amount of time to do exams. It also ends repeat exams.”
Philips also redid its entire beam-forming capability in the transducer for its EPIQ ultrasound system, which launched last year and is used in cardiovascular imaging. The company used “massive parallel processing for precision beam forming,” Gallimore says.
“Typically what the compromise is, either you have to give up frame rate or penetration to get image quality,” Gallimore says. EPIQ provides “more consistent image quality throughout the field of study.”
In fact, Klein partially attributes a decline in the cardiology sector to the late introduction of the Philips EPIQ system, which he considers to be the next wave of premium systems. The expectation of the launch stalled the market and shipments of the system were too late in the year to have a positive impact on the growth of the cardiology market.
Siemens’ ultra-premium ACUSON S3000 ultrasound system also received very good reviews based on data in the most recent KLAS report, with providers raving about image quality from the system’s higher-frequency, curved-array transducer. The S3000 system, along with the rest of the ACUSON S family of ultrasound systems, recently received further enhancements with the new HELX Evolution release, which debuted last December.
“The initial customer feedback regarding the ACUSON S3000 has been remarkable,” says Jeffrey Bundy, CEO of the Siemens ultrasound business unit. “And now, with the improvements delivered by the HELX Evolution release in terms of image quality, operational efficiency and workflow, we feel that the ACUSON S3000 system is well positioned to become a huge leader in the ultrasound arena.”
Smarter biopsy
Dr. Jeffrey Lumerman, a urologist who practices in Garden City, N.Y., has been using the UroNav fusion biopsy developed by Invivo, a subsidiary of Philips Medical Systems. Generally, ultrasound-guided biopsy is done after a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test comes back positive. The new technology fuses MRI and ultrasound images to provide a more comprehensive picture of the prostate and uses a technology similar to GPS navigation, allowing doctors to better target the biopsy. The MRI shows areas where doctors are more likely to find significant cancers.
