New GE Technology Targets Obesity-related Disease

GE Healthcare today announced 510k clearance of CoreScan* – a widely-accessible application dedicated to quickly and accurately quantifying visceral adipose tissue (VAT), or visceral "belly” fat, during body composition analysis. Hosted on GE Lunar’s iDXA body composition system, CoreScan provides patients and physicians an advanced tool to quantify VAT in order to help assess, manage, and treat obesity-related disease.

"CoreScan offers instant, precise and reproducible fat-quantifying results that go beyond the bathroom scale,” said Laura Stoltenberg, general manager of GE Healthcare’s Lunar business. "As part of an iDXA body composition exam, CoreScan can help patients and physicians tailor individualized health and wellness plans while addressing the growing global danger of obesity-related disease.”

With the number of obese individuals worldwide nearly doubling to more than half a billion over the last three decades,¹ global healthcare spending on obesity-related disease is climbing. Medical care related to obesity costs the United States roughly $168 billion annually, or more than 15 percent of national healthcare spending.² The swelling cost of obesity-related disease makes it vital that patients and physicians have access to a VAT-quantifying tool like CoreScan.

VAT is fat that surrounds abdominal organs. While VAT levels may not correlate with an individual’s waist size or weight, excess VAT levels are linked to obesity, which has been shown to increase the risk of Type 2 Diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia and other diseases.

"Quantification of visceral fat with a practical, patient-friendly application like CoreScan would transform our ability to accurately evaluate, treat and monitor patients,” said Steven B. Heymsfield, MD, Executive Director of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. "This technology can also advance research and clinical approaches for overweight and obesity evaluation by providing improvements over existing clinical tools.”

CoreScan technology gives healthcare professionals, in a variety of clinical settings, immediate results that can help determine if a lifestyle intervention would benefit the patient.

About CoreScan:

CoreScan, a new application on GE Lunar iDXA body composition systems, is designed to quickly and precisely quantify a patient’s visceral adipose tissue (VAT), or visceral "belly” fat, using a non-invasive, low-dose x-ray exam. GE’s iDXA systems provide total and regional body composition assessments of fat tissue, lean tissue and bone mineral content in an easy-to-interpret report. Available for adults of almost every age and size, CoreScan reports from an iDXA exam can help healthcare professionals manage VAT and obesity-related disease – including hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia and metabolic syndrome. CoreScan pursues the GE Healthymagination vision by offering a high quality, accessible route for quantifying VAT.

* Trademark of General Electric Company

About GE Healthcare:

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our broad expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, performance improvement and performance solutions services help our customers to deliver better care to more people around the world at a lower cost. In addition, we partner with healthcare leaders, striving to leverage the global policy change necessary to implement a successful shift to sustainable healthcare systems.

Our "healthymagination” vision for the future invites the world to join us on our journey as we continuously develop innovations focused on reducing costs, increasing access and improving quality around the world. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employees are 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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¹ The Lancet, Volume 377, Issue 9765, Pages 568 - 577, 12 February 2011.

² National Bureau of Economic Research report, October 2010.