GE feels it has come a long way since the company’s annual report in 1948, which addressed the 50,000,000-volt biased betatron that was expected to help in researching cancer.
That may never have materialized or worked the way it should have, but GE’s healthcare business, currently employing 46,000 people worldwide, says its innovation has “improved the quality of healthcare while providing doctors the tools to catch deadly diseases like cancer before it is too late.”
According to a story by Leon Kaye, the fourth in a series of posts entitled “Technology for Good: A Historical Perspective From GE,” the company took its first step into the healthcare field with X-ray technology. Twenty years later, GE scientist Jacob G. Rabatin developed a highly efficient x-ray machine that not only let doctors see more but minimized the exposure patients had to endure “down to one-quarter of the levels typical of standard x-ray devices.”
By the 1970’s, internal medicine diagnostics leapt ahead when a new scanner was launched by GE’s Research and Development Center and Medical Systems Division in 1976. The first ever CAT, or CT as it’s now called, scans. Its official name: “Computed tomography scanner.”
Kaye wrote that the machine “could take detailed x-ray cross sections of the body in less than five seconds,” four to 60 times faster than other total body scanners on the market at the time. Even better, new scanner technologies “reduced blurring and offered doctors a more lucid picture.”
But as good at the CT scan is for detecting anatomic anomalies, GE went one better. In 1983 it unveiled the magnetic resonance imaging system, or MRI, allowing doctors to take pictures in many cases instead of resorting to surgery. The MRI used “a superconducting magnet that had a pull 30,000 stronger than the earth’s magnetic field,” according to Kaye.
GE developed the magnetic resonance-guided therapy system in 1993, permitting doctors to view internal organs in real-time while having direct access to the patient.
More recent innovations include the Lightspeed™ scanning device, introduced in 1998, which “gave doctors the ability to view multiple internal images quickly at a rate six times as fast as single-slice scanners–saving critical time in an emergency room,” and a year later, “functional anatomy mapping, which let doctors pinpoint exactly where a disease was located within a patient’s body.”
Many breast cancer patients, myself included, are grateful to GE for its introduction of full field digital mammography in 2000, “an important development in the fight against breast cancer because the images could be manipulated and provide more clarity,” according to Kaye.
And because these images are so clear, cancer can now be detected and treated much earlier, yielding much better outcomes.
Edited by
Braden Becker
