"We believe that this was the best partnership and the best collaboration," he said. "And [GE is made up of] forward-thinking innovators and experts in imaging technology, so we are delighted to have this relationship."

GE has a 30-year history of advancements in CT imaging that help lower dose. This culminated last year when the company announced its Veo product -- what GE says is the world's first model-based iterative reconstruction technique. With this technology, physicians have achieved chest CT exams that have a dose as low as a chest X-ray, according to Denison. The images use less than 1 millisievert (mSV) of radiation dose.


"[1 mSV] is about the same amount of radiation you would get living in the environment from background sources -- your television, the basement, the sun -- for 90 days," Steven Gray, vice president and general manager for GE's global computed tomography and advantage workstation, told DOTmed News. "So we think at that level, it's a huge improvement."

In comparison, traditional chest CT scans can expose patients to anywhere from 5 mSv to 10 mSv of radiation dose, and natural background radiation exposes the average American to around 3 mSv per year.

"[GE's new technology] is much more expensive and much more computer-intensive and it takes a little longer to reconstruct images, but this technology really breaks the paradigm of being able to image at low doses and get exceptional image quality," said Gray.

Do patient fears equal less CT utilization?
But even with these improvements, have patients -- now more knowledgeable about the modality and its potential risks -- been turned off of CT scans altogether? Dr. John Pellerito, CT imaging chief and associate chairman at North Shore-LIJ Radiology, thinks not.

"I think patients are more aware now of the potential risks of radiation exposure, so they ask a lot more questions about the necessity of CT scans, and they also ask about other imaging tests they can have instead of a CT scan," he explained to DOTmed News.

However, he emphasized that for most patients, the risk is still very low. "The only time we start to worry about dose is when patients have multiple scans, and the cumulative dose may pose a potential risk for that patient," he added.

The lifesaving benefits of CT in terms of the diagnostic capability of the equipment to diagnose a disease earlier and help guide the treatment for that disease is a huge medical benefit, according to Gray.

"If people get scared away from CT imaging, the tremendous health benefit they get from an early diagnosis and an ability to get treatment goes away and that would be catastrophic to the world's health," he noted.

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