by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | June 15, 2020
From the May 2020 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Oncofreeze AI creates an image that is virtually free of motion without the need for a respiratory belt.
“Positioning respiratory belts can be tricky,” Swystun said. “A patient’s breathing can change during acquisition. OncoFreeze AI is a deviceless solution without the need to prepare the patient and position a respiratory belt or alternate device. The AI portion will select automatically the range where motion generally occurs based on the patient’s anatomy resulting in an image virtually free of motion .”
Benefits come with using Oncofreeze AI and FlowMotion AI together.
“With both FlowMotion and OncoFreeze, the user would normally set up the ranges manually,” Swystun said. “Now with the introduction of AI we’ve taken that and made it automatic, so the user doesn’t have to choose where to start and stop the scan.”
FAST PET Workflow AI assists technologists after the exam by creating parallel ranges of reconstructed data to send to the PACS automatically, instead of requiring the technologist to do it manually.
“It will detect where the reconstructed images start and end, prepare the parallel ranges, such as fused axial, coronal and sagittal, and send them off automatically, rather than the user defining the ranges and sending them across manually,” Swystun said. “It streamlines it for them.”
On the SPECT side, the company recently received FDA 510(k) clearance for the inclusion of an additional isotope — Iodine-131, for use in evaluating and planning treatment – with xSPECT Quant.
As with all xSPECT Quant isotopes, a patented National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-traceable calibration source is utilized and allows for the use of an expanded quantification solution available with the Symbia Intevo and Symbia Intevo Bold SPECT/CT scanners. Without xSPECT Quant, customers have to use phantoms and do calculations manually for calibration, which are time consuming and error-prone, said Collin Schaeffer, global marketing operations manager for PET/CT, SPECT, and SPECT/CT at Siemens Healthineers.
“It allows us to standardize the data across scanners,” Schaeffer said. “Physicians can evaluate how much dose has gone to certain areas of the body and this can help them plan for additional therapy, and aid in decision making for providing the right dose at the right time for each patient.”
Spectrum Dynamics
At the end of 2018, Spectrum Dynamics received FDA clearance for its VERITON-CT SPECT/CT system, with 16-, 64- or 128-slice configurations, following clearance of the VERITON-NM 12-detector digital SPECT system.
