GE Healthcare to Acquire IMACTIS for CT Interventional Guidance
The freshly spun-off GE HealthCare announced its first acquisition, snatching up the French CT navigation system developer IMACTIS.
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By - After its separation from parent company General Electric (GE) at the beginning of the year, GE HealthCare has already entered into an acquisition deal with the France-based IMACTIS. In announcing the agreement, GE HealthCare focused on the promising computerized tomography (CT) navigation product developed by IMACTIS that is approved in Europe and the United States.
“We’re thrilled to take this step in strengthening our interventional guidance offering for patients and customers,” said Jan Makela, President, and CEO of Imaging, GE HealthCare. “The IMACTIS CT-Navigation system is designed to improve workflow for interventional radiologists and hospitals by increasing procedural accuracy while helping to reduce procedure time and radiation dose for patients and physicians.”
CT navigation tools like the one developed by IMACTIS improve clinician workflows and patient safety in several ways. Percutaneous interventions using CT navigation involve sending a needle into a patient to perform a biopsy, drainage, ablation, or other similar procedure, which requires extreme precision to avoid affecting structures surrounding the target site.
Using CT navigation during image-guided minimally invasive procedures can assist clinicians in avoiding critical structures within the body, improve the effectiveness of interventions, and allow for real-time treatment planning.
The IMACTIS product improves on other offerings by allowing physicians to plan for and select optimal needle trajectories and then guide one or more needles with continuous monitoring and control of movement. And according to IMACTIS, guided procedures also reduce the time needed to conduct operations while improving the overall accuracy of radiological procedures.
“The timing to join GE HealthCare is perfect,” said Pierre Olivier, President, and CEO of IMACTIS. “Our solution, already deployed in leading healthcare systems in Europe and the US, is ready to scale and become a standard of care, thanks to GE HealthCare’s market access.”
GE HealthCare has recently focused a large amount of its funding and effort on supporting medical imaging endeavors throughout Europe and the US. Toward the end of 2022, the company boosted its production capabilities at its Cork, Ireland, medical imaging manufacturing facility and announced a new long-term agreement with its primary supplier of contrast media.
Earlier last year, GE HealthCare also contributed $50 million to Pulsenmore, a digital ultrasound device that caters to the home healthcare market. Additionally, the company upped its digital assets by creating a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services to deliver artificial intelligence tools for medical imaging to hospitals and healthcare providers.
