GE is the only manufacturer in the industry today that provides the entire mammography imaging chain from tube, detector to review workstation, and integrates comprehensive customer needs into our roadmap for the future.

Breast Magnetic Resonance (MR)


With its high sensitivity, MR is a rapidly growing modality in breast imaging. It is being used as an imaging tool for high-risk patients, and as a problem-solving tool for patients with dense breasts and indeterminate mammograms. It is also used to define the extent of disease by looking at chemical makeup with breast spectroscopy.
New MR techniques are emerging that may further improve the specificity of breast MRI such as GE's new breakthrough MR application BREASE. GE's MR BREASE improves the ability to distinguish benign breast lesions from cancerous ones by showing elevated concentrations of choline, a product of membrane synthesis that rises in rapidly reproducing cancer cells and is a strong indicator of malignancy. BREASE potentially reduces the number of benign biopsies indicated by MR, according to Robert Lenkinski, PhD, head of MRI research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.


"The potential for adding spectroscopy to the standard breast MRI exam is that it can greatly improve a radiologist's ability to distinguish benign breast lesions from cancerous ones," said Lenkinski. Spectroscopy adds another measure to improve the overall accuracy of MR scanning of the breast."

GE's MR BREASE is a new enhancement to the company's VIBRANT (volume imaging for breast assessment) high definition technology that enables a non-invasive imaging procedure of both breasts simultaneously, in a single patient visit. VIBRANT -XV further expands the capability to acquire high-resolution images at high speed, providing both exquisite anatomical detail as well as critical kinetic information. GE has more 400 VIBRANT installations worldwide.

"Our confidence level is extraordinary high with breast VIBRANT," said Dr. A. Joseph Borelli, Jr. of MRI at Belfair in Bluffton, South Carolina. "This new technology is having a huge impact on the lives of the women we are scanning."

Through GE's collaboration with Confirma, the market leader for
computer-aided-detection (CAD) for breast MR, GE distributes CADstream technology to MR customers worldwide. CADstream enhances the clinical efficacy of breast MR studies by highlighting and color-coding areas indicative of breast cancer for further review and automatically correcting MR images for patient movement. Working together, VIBRANT and CADstream can reduce processing and interpretation time to a maximum of 10 minutes, while helping to improve the quality of breast MRI programs.

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