European team awarded 3.2M grant

In December of 2018, GE Healthcare’s MR team in Hungary won a $3.2M grant from EIT Health to work with customers to streamline the delivery of radiation therapy (RT). Approximately one in three people will develop cancer in their lifetime and about half of these patients will experience RT. Today’s RT workflow is quite complex, time-consuming, costly and stressful for anxious patients. One of the goals of the research is to develop and produce a silent, one-stop, MR-only RT solution, leveraging the full potential of multi-parametric MR and deep learning artificial intelligence.

Members of the GE Healthcare team include Florian Wiesinger, PhD, Principal Investigator, Timo Schirmer, PhD, and Senior Scientist Cristina Cozzin, PhD. Clinical partners for clinical development, assessment and patient scanning include New Castle University (Prof. Hazel McCallum and Prof. Ross Maxwell) and Erasmus Medical Center (Prof. Steve Petit and Prof. Juan Hernandez Tamames). Additionally, the team is partnering with the Technical University Munich, King’s College London, Szeged University and SyntheticMR.

The EIT Health grant focuses on healthcare innovation. The organization cited GE Healthcare’s great reputation regarding pseudo CT image conversion, deep learning, silent imaging and parameter mapping as a key reason for the award.