GE HealthCare has made MR scanning 12 times faster with Sonic DL, an FDA cleared deep-learning technology that will provide clinicians with the speed to capture high-quality cardiac MR scans in a single heartbeat and conduct exams in one minute.

The gold standard for assessing cardiovascular disease, cardiac MR is too slow to capture a heart contraction in real time. Sonic DL matches the speed of the scanner to the speed of the patient’s cardiac physiology, reducing scanning times by up to 83%, mitigating the occurrence of motion artifacts that compromise image quality.

"This significant time savings supports our vision for a complete cardiac MR exam in 30 minutes or less," Anja Brau, general manager of MR clinical solutions and research collaborations at GE HealthCare, told HCB News.
Patients do not have to hold their breath multiple times during exams, and clinicians do not have to scan several heartbeats to stitch together with conventional methods to visualize one "apparent" beat, according to Brau, making exams simpler, and eliminating risks of patient degradation and compromised spatial and temporal resolutions created with these methods.

Sonic DL is compatible via an upgrade for the majority of GE HealthCare 1.5T and 3T scanners, including new and already installed ones.

It can also be used alongside Air Recon DL, which utilizes all raw data collected by MR scanners to maximize image quality and resolution, even when scanning time is shorter; and reduces exam times by 30% to 50%. Air Recon DL is approved for use on 1.5T, 3T, and 7T MR systems.

The faster scan times streamline workflow and alleviate backlogs, according to Brau.

In the past week, the company also gained FDA clearance for its Precision DL image processing software, which is designed to improve contrast-to-noise ratio, contrast recovery, and quantitative accuracy on the company’s first all-digital PET/CT, Omni Legend.

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