CHICAGO, IL - GE Healthcare has announced a series of five symposiums aimed to educate the medical community on the benefits of CT radiation dose reduction. Launched today in Chicago, the tuition-free, accredited training provides access to the latest clinical techniques and is available to any radiologist that operates or reads CT scans.

"At Sanford Children's hospital, we're dose-conscious within all of our modalities. Our use of ASiR (Adaptive Statistical Iterative Reconstruction) on our 64 slice CT Scanner has reduced our radiation exposure by 40%," said Charles P. O'Brien, MD, President, Sanford USD Medical Center and Sanford Children's Hospital. "As the first children's hospital in the country to offer dose reduction technology with ASIR capability, we've been able to not only lower our dose but improve the image quality of all CT scans."

The first session in Chicago will feature a keynote by Cynthia K. Rigsby, M.D., Division Head of Body Imaging and Vice-Chair, Medical Imaging at Children's Memorial Hospital, Chicago, Ill. and Associate Professor of Radiology at Northwestern University. The five-part education series will address CT dose reduction techniques and best practices for pediatrics, cardiac and general use. GE will also preview ASiR, an application that allows physicians to reduce dose while improving image quality and low contrast detectability.
Historically, better diagnostic images required more radiation dose, but today better images can be achieved by technique and technology. Introduced earlier this year, GE's Discovery CT750 HD, one of its healthymagination products, provides the opportunity to decrease dose by up to 50% in full body, while maintaining high quality image resolution. GE's healthymagination initiative promises to increase access to care, reduce healthcare costs and improve the quality of patient care.

"GE's commitment offers tremendous promise for equipping radiologists and technologists with breakthrough techniques to reduce dose within their daily practice," said Steve Gray, Vice President & General Manager of Computed Tomography, GE Healthcare. "Through these events, GE will focus on sharing information and discussing techniques for both managing and minimizing dose, while maintaining the utmost in image quality."

Other scheduled events in the Dose Reduction Symposium series include: Columbus, Ohio, New York City, Seattle and Orlando. The events are free-of-charge and attendees will receive 4.5 hours of CE credits. Interested individuals may visit www.gehealthcare.com/lowdoseCT and click on Low Dose Symposiums for more information and to register for these events.