GE Gets FDA Clearance on Cardiac “Snapshots”

GE Healthcare announced today at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics annual meeting that the FDA gave it 510(k) clearance on the new Snapshot Cine, a multislice computed tomography (CT) feature designed to enable clinicians to obtain quality images of a patient’s heart with up to a 70 percent reduction in dose per exam independent of heart rate.
Snapshot Cine automatically responds to a patient’s heart rate by turning the CT X-ray on and off at desired times during a patient’s heart rate cycle, a process called prospective triggered gating. SnapShot Cine significantly reduces a patient’s X-ray exposure time as the X-ray is only on for portions of a scan.
With Snapshot Cine the multislice scanner is reportedly capable of performing CT angiographic (CTA) studies where the table moves from one location to the next to cover the entire volume of the patient’s heart, a mode of scanning called step-and-shoot.