Ohhh, I did not talk about the novel offerings of the big vendors. Well, nothing that I believe is really worth mentioning in my personal and subjective report. SIEMENS HEALTHINEERS introduced three new MRI systems, with three weird and complicated names that neither reveal the field strength nor their value proposition. But that is marketing! By the way the third one that was not shown before is the Cima.X … ask your local representative for the details.
Of course GE, PHILIPS and SIEMENS showed plenty of enhancements, improvements, detail solutions, more or less useful gadgets … but all to be expected from innovation leaders. PHILIPS showed a Spectral CT Angio combination (remember my comments at the beginning), and GE presented the new ALLIA angio suite on a robot system with a AR control and intuitive and innovative software solution (picture at the bottom).
Dear OEM please apologise for not mentioning your innovations properly and for being so focussed on more disruptive solutions. I am quite aware that you are following the business and that your incremental innovations are valuable and needed. But they can be better communicated and presented by your product experts and sales representatives.
I am slowly getting to the most important part of this report — who will win the annual Michael Friebe booth prize. This year I actually decided that there should be two winners and for different reasons.
So here we go …
BOOTH PRIZE — TWO WINNERS!!!
Congratulations CANON (first time winner) and GE (won before, do not know how many times).
What are the reasons?
CANON: novel design with a curved center path following the modalities to the central element - IT / SOFTWARE / AI. Very interesting and intuitive design.