GE HealthCare has teamed up with the University of Cincinnati (UC), UC Health, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to develop next-generation MRI hardware and software.
The collaboration will create a co-located MRI research and development (R&D) centre on UC’s medical campus, which brings together clinical investigators and GE HealthCare scientists.
Under the academic-industrial collaboration, GE HealthCare will receive an R&D grant from JobsOhio, a private economic development corporation in Ohio.
It will create engineering and manufacturing jobs at the MRI coils facility in Aurora, OH, along with new clinical and scientific roles at the Cincinnati R&D Centre facility.
GE HealthCare MR clinical solutions and research collaborations general manager Anja Brau said: “We are excited to launch a collaboration with our partners at UC, UC Health, and Cincinnati Children’s to bring technical knowledge from our GE HealthCare MR Applied Science Lab team together in the field with clinical expertise from these renowned health institutions.
“We find this model of ‘real world’ collaboration effective to leverage collective strengths of industry and academia and accelerate the translation from prototype to clinical reality.”
The collaboration builds on GE HealthCare’s strong presence in Ohio, including its MRI RF coil R&D and manufacturing facility in Aurora.
The new research facility at the UC campus is intended for conducting studies that would support the development and validation of the next-generation MRI technology.
It will feature GE HealthCare’s 3.0T wide-bore MRI scanner, the SIGNA Premier.
The MRI platform comes with the company’s hardware technologies, including AIR Coils, and its latest AI software technologies, such as AIR Recon DL and Sonic DL applications.
University of Cincinnati College of Medicine department of radiology Ben Felson chair and UC Health imaging services chief Mary Mahoney said: “We are excited to embark on a new research collaboration with GE HealthCare.
“Through our collective efforts, we would be able to push the boundaries of knowledge, discover innovative solutions, and improve the lives of those we serve.
“The University of Cincinnati and UC Health fully embrace this opportunity to advance imaging science and help develop and build the workforce of technologists, engineers, and scientists in health imaging for Ohio.”
