GE Healthcare announced today that the company has signed a six-year research agreement with St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center to establish a landmark alliance in medical research. The agreement is expected to advance personalized healthcare by accelerating joint research efforts and quickly transitioning those discoveries into the clinical environment.

"This announcement marks the launch of a significant collaboration between two leaders in healthcare and academic research capable of leveraging world-class technology and world-class medical research to meet the healthcare challenges of the future," said John Chiminski, vice president and general manager of GE Healthcare's global magnetic resonance business.

According to leaders at both organizations, this research alliance will focus on a number of groundbreaking technologies, including the continuation of new MR applications. James Pipe, Ph.D., a bioengineer at Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's, developed a new method that allows technologists to obtain clearer MR scans with less sensitivity to patient motion. This breakthrough technology, called PROPELLER (Periodically Rotated Overlapping ParallEL Lines with Enhanced Reconstruction) has been incorporated into all of GE Healthcare's Signa HD (High Definition) MR scanners. For the first time, PROPELLER provides physicians with unprecedented image clarity in cases involving patients who are difficult to scan due to their movement (this includes children who have traditionally required sedation to undergo scans and Parkinson's patients).

"We are excited about this agreement with GE and the potential it holds for research," said Linda Hunt, president of St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center. "Using GE's premium technology in both the research and clinical environments and having GE scientists as collaborators should significantly shorten the cycle time for St. Joseph's to clinically implement new MR applications." '"/>

Contact: Kimberly Lodge
klodge@chw.edu
602-406-6678
St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center
8-Mar-2006

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