Whilst I am honored to be invited as the 2022 Guest Editor of SIGNA™ Pulse of MR, it is against a backdrop of new variants of COVID-19 causing infection rates, hospitalizations and deaths to fluctuate across the globe and the Russian invasion of Ukraine resulting in the largest humanitarian catastrophe that Europe has seen since the Second World War. In March, GE and the GE Foundation announced $4.5 million in philanthropic commitments to provide immediate support to Ukraine and neighboring countries impacted by the violence there. GE Healthcare is donating $4 million in life-saving medical equipment and the GE Foundation is donating $500,000 to the International Rescue Committee and Airlink to provide immediate and long-term relief to neighboring countries welcoming refugees from Ukraine.
The effects of COVID-19 and the conflict in Ukraine also continue to cause havoc with global supply chains, and I know GE Healthcare is working hard to fulfill orders for many countries. Having recently upgraded our fleet of Optima™ MR450w systems to SIGNA™ Artist and our SIGNA™ Explorer 1.5T mobile system, we are anxiously awaiting the delivery of our first SIGNA™ Premier. This multi-nuclear equipped system will become our new platform for the development of our metabolic imaging program in Cambridge and will provide multi-channel receiver capabilities for our work in hyperpolarised carbon-13, hydrogen-2 and sodium-23 as well as other nuclei. We have already been truly amazed by the quality of the AIR™ Recon DL images produced by our SIGNA™ Artist 1.5T systems, and we are keen to explore the potential of this technology at 3.0T. In fact, in this issue, we share the impact of reinvesting in an existing magnet with a SIGNA™ Architect Lift that includes AIR™ Recon DL at ASZ Aalst Hospital.
The visually improved SNR, spatial resolution and reduced ringing artifacts have impressed my clinical colleagues and, when combined with our suite of AIR™ Coils, AIR™ Recon DL has demonstrated multiple advantages for patients, technologists/radiographers, radiologists and our referring clinicians. Not only have we seen the benefits of the AIR™ family of technologies, but several articles in this edition of SIGNA™ Pulse of MR have also beautifully demonstrated the outstanding image quality and potential for reducing acquisition times in MR enterography, abdominal imaging and multi-parametric prostate exams. The benefits of AIR™ Recon DL combined with diffusion-weighted imaging is also summarized in a whitepaper.
Other articles discuss the inclusion of MR elastography into the standard liver imaging protocol at Shin-Yurigaoka General Hospital and Yokahama City University Graduate School of Medicine, both located in Japan, the use of the SIGNA™ PET/MR for radiotherapy treatment planning at INTECNUS, Bariloche, Argentina, and the use of GE Healthcare’s zero echo time pulse sequence and reconstruction (oZTEo) that has been optimised for providing CT-like contrast for bone at Hacettepe University Faculty of Medicine, Ankara, Turkey.
This issue of SIGNA™ Pulse of MR contains several other articles and case studies covering a broad spectrum of MR applications showcasing many of the cutting-edge MR techniques deployed on a range of GE MR systems. I hope you enjoy reading this issue, and I look forward to working with the editorial team to bring you further articles describing some of the exciting new developments in MR that GE has planned for 2022.
