New tech innovations are changing the face of healthcare from mere ‘disease treatment’ to prevention, prediction and pre-symptomatic detection.
Early detection of diseases could ultimately lead to disease-modifying medications that could be used early in disease, perhaps during the presymptomatic period.
Developing tools to improve early detection could move diagnosis earlier in the disease course, offering potential benefits such as:
- Identification of people at-risk
- Enhancing the current diagnostic tools
- Improving the accuracy of diagnosis
- Enriching subject populations in clinical trials, and
- Enabling earlier and accurate treatments.
General Electric (GE) healthcare is leading the way to this future of healthcare, and we take a look at three of the company’s latest developments.
Healthcare technology made cheaper
GE’s cheaper portable medical devices for emerging markets
GE Healthcare recently announced the creation of a new business unit which will develop high-value, low-cost technologies and healthcare delivery solutions.
The unit, called Sustainable Healthcare Solutions (SHS), will develop high-value, low-cost technologies and healthcare delivery solutions across multiple care settings.
It will invest $300 million as part of a multi-phase effort to develop a more robust affordable healthcare portfolio for customers in all 54 African countries.
Currently, its innovations for emerging markets include handheld ultrasound device Vscan Access and Lullaby infant warmer.
These are improving outcomes in remote rural settings in maternal infant care, a major focus area for many emerging markets.
View your heart in 4D
GE’s cSound – view a heart in 4D
GE Healthcare has developed brand new ultrasound software that allows specialists to see the heart in “extreme 4D” – the three spatial dimensions plus time.
The software delivers images so clear that it allows specialists observe how blood swirls around clots in arteries.
Traditional heart ultrasound is slow and limited to the finite amount of data it was originally built to handle in creating an image of the body.
As a result, it often produces less detailed images and requires lengthy hardware redesigns.
The new software, called cSound, can collect a practically infinite amount of data to create an image of the human body.
The cSound software is so powerful that it can process an amount of data equivalent to playing an entire DVD in just one second, in real-time.
The software is especially useful in scanning patients with lung disease or those who are obese or in a critical condition, all of whom are currently hard to image.
Precise diagnostic test for lung cancer drug
Lung cancer
GE Healthcare is offering a companion diagnostic which will help identify patients most likely to benefit from Merck’s newly-approved lung cancer drug, Keytruda.
With diagnostic analysis from Clarient, physicians will be able to understand the PD-L1 expression status for their patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer.
To help identify eligible patients, Clarient will perform an FDA-approved assay that determines the expression status of the biomarker protein PD-L1 from a patient’s biopsy tissue sample.
It can then identify those patients that will likely respond most effectively to Keytruda, allowing for earlier and more effective treatment.
In the following video, General Electric looks at the future of healthcare.
