GE and Medis Collaborate on Noninvasive Coronary Assessments for CAD

May 24, 2024 —GE HealthCare and Medis Medical Imaging recently announced their collaboration aimed at helping advance precision care in the diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery disease (CAD).

The press release stated that the companies will further the development and commercialization of Medis Quantitative Flow Ratio (Medis QFR), a noninvasive, image-based diagnostic approach to the assessment of coronary physiology and the treatment of CAD, as part of GE HealthCare’s interventional cardiology portfolio built around the Allia platform. The collaboration seeks to provide access to emerging technologies and to reduce complexity in the catheterization lab.

Medis’ QFR solution, which delivers image-based physiology of coronary obstructions based on angiography imaging analysis alone, is intended to help interventional cardiologists determine if a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is required to treat the patient or if treatment should be deferred for ongoing monitoring or other alternative treatment options. If treatment is needed, the technology can help clinicians select the lesion(s) for treatment and create a treatment plan for a balloon or stent-based PCI procedure, while also helping the clinician evaluate the efficacy of that treatment.

The companies noted that the benefits of QFR guidance are supported by a study showing that a QFR-guided strategy of lesion selection for PCI improved 2-year clinical outcomes, including a reduction in myocardial infarction and ischemia-driven revascularization when compared with standard angiography guidance alone.

The study findings were reported at TCT 2022, the 34th annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics scientific symposium, and published by Lei Song, MD, et al in Journal of the American College of Cardiology (2022;80:2089-2101).

In October 2023, GE HealthCare announced FDA 510(k) clearance of an addition to the company’s image-guided system (IGS) portfolio: Allia IGS Pulse, which features a new imaging chain that provides imaging at the right dose for visible impact in complex cardiology interventions regardless of patient size.