GE Healthcare Acquires Prismatic Sensors

November 20, 2020—GE Healthcare announced the acquisition of Prismatic Sensors AB, a Swedish start-up specializing in deep silicon detector technology for photon-counting CT (PCCT). GE Healthcare, which has held a minority position in Prismatic Sensors since 2017, expects to close the acquisition by January 2021.

According to GE, this technology has the potential to establish a new standard of care in oncology, cardiology, neurology, and many other clinical CT applications. The company stated that PCCT has the promise to further expand the clinical capabilities of traditional CT, including the visualization of minute details of organ structures, improved tissue characterization, more accurate material density measurement (or quantification), and lower radiation dose.

Prismatic Sensors has patented a way to position the silicon sensors “edge on” so the detector is deep enough to absorb very high energy photons and fast enough to count hundreds of millions of CT photons per second. The company was founded in 2012 as a spin-off from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

“It has been evident for decades that CT (and x-ray imaging) would benefit greatly from energy-discriminating photon-counting detectors,” commented Norbert Pelc, ScD, in the GE announcement. Dr. Pelc is Professor of Radiology, Emeritus at Stanford University in Stanford, California.

Dr. Pelc continued, “The challenge has been developing detectors that can handle the very high photon flux from high-power x-ray tubes while delivering good energy resolution and maintaining or improving spatial resolution. Of course, the detectors also have to be manufacturable at reasonable cost. It is a huge testament to the scientists and engineers at Prismatic Sensors that they have achieved this. I expect the impact on the CT field will be large, for example, improved dose efficiency, particularly for low dose acquisitions and for applications that benefit from tissue specificity. To put the higher spatial resolution of this deep silicon detector in perspective, we have not seen an improvement of this magnitude in decades, and every other time that spatial resolution was improved significantly the utility of CT also advanced. This is very exciting.”

GE Healthcare noted that its researchers began studying PCCT in 1993 and introduced the first PCCT prototype using cadmium-based detectors in 2006. Now, deep silicon detectors are a better solution for CT to accommodate the much higher count-rate demands of CT imaging, thereby providing much more information to clinicians.

“Clinicians rely on the information they receive from medical images—like those we receive from a CT—to help correctly diagnose patients, monitor cases, and make treatment decisions,” explained Staffan Holmin, MD, in the press release. Dr. Holmin is Professor in Clinical Neuroimaging, Karolinska Institutet and Senior Consultant at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden. “What’s so exciting about photon-counting CT is that it brings higher spatial resolution and contrast. This can help us to image small blood vessels, vascular pathologies, and to see malignant changes at an earlier stage when treatment can be more effective. The potential for substantially reduced radiation is also important, particularly for pediatric patients. Photon counting will likely become the standard of care for all clinical applications where CT is used today.”