GE HealthCare is further advancing its precision care strategy with CT-Navigation, which offers clinicians detailed, real-time, 3D computed tomography (CT) images for stereotactic needle guidance across an array of care areas, including interventional and oncological procedures, as well as biopsies, ablations, drainage, and therapeutics.
Providing highly detailed images of internal structures such as bones, organs, and tumours, CT-guided interventions can assist clinicians in performing minimally invasive procedures that guide stereotactic needles through the anatomy to biopsy or deliver treatment directly to affected tissue. As a result, interventionalists benefit from greater visibility and confidence in needle placement, while patients benefit from more accurate and precise care.
“Consistent and accurate navigation through the body is key in delivering precision care,” explained Laura Crocetti, associate professor of Radiology, Division of Interventional Radiology, University of Pisa (Pisa, Italy) and deputy chairperson of the European Conference on Interventional Oncology (ECIO). “CT-Navigation is an intuitive technology that helps us achieve this by enabling clinicians to select and follow an out-of-plane trajectory for a safer path that avoids critical organs and reaches deep-located targets with impressive accuracy, while reducing procedure time and possibly radiation dose. All together, it helps us ensure better patient outcomes while expanding the boundaries of our practice.”
CT-Navigation enables a more comfortable and safe experience than some of the alternative solutions. Instead of working wholly within the CT system’s narrow bore, interventionalists using CT-Navigation can place a sensor on the patient inside the gantry. After scans are complete and the patient is removed from inside the system, interventionalists have full range of motion while navigating a needle more easily and safely through the patient’s anatomy using the placed sensor and detailed CT images.
CT-Navigation was developed by IMACTIS and became part of the GE HealthCare portfolio of solutions upon close of the previously announced acquisition of the France-based company.
The GE HealthCare system, which includes a mobile workstation, guidance software, and disposable procedure kit, is approved under the European Union’s Medical Devices Regulation (MDR) and has US Food and Drug Administration clearance for use within the USA.
