Waukesha, WI -- GE Healthcare has received a Bronze IDEA award for the Signa HDe MR system in the Medical & Scientific Products category in the 2007 International Design Excellence Awards. The Signa HDe was the only diagnostic imaging product to win an IDEA 07 award from the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). Co-sponsored by BusinessWeek magazine in conjunction with IDSA, the idea program fosters business and public understanding of the impact of industrial design excellence on the quality of life and the economy.

"GE Healthcare is honored to be the only diagnostic imaging company to receive an IDEA 07 award," said David Handler, general manager of marketing for GE Healthcare's MR business. "One of the major success factors for Signa Hde is the unique combination of calming, patient-anxiety reducing aesthetics with a timeless, high-tech appearance. In the design of our industry-leading MRI systems, our product development teams work hard to blend aesthetic excellence with advanced technology to enhance patient comfort, usability and clinical functionality."

IDSA evaluated 1,691 entries from 30 across categories as diverse as consumer electronics, house wares, transportation, sporting goods, furniture, eco-design and medical and scientific equipment. Overall, 81 entries received awards, including 20 Gold, 18 Silver and 42 Bronze.
Signa HDe 1.5T MR is built on GE's exclusive high-definition (HD) MR platform with a 30 percent smaller footprint than a typical 1.5T system, allowing it to be installed in the same physical location as 0.5T MR systems with lower operating and siting costs. Installation time is reduced to one week, enabling facilities to begin generating a return on investment in less than half the time of typical MR installations.

ABOUT GE HEALTHCARE:
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com

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