[This entry is marked for removal.]

GE Medical Systems and Amersham announced in April 2004 the completion of a share exchange acquisition of Amersham Health by GE. The result of this acquisition is the new GE Healthcare, based in the UK, totally owned by General Electric (GE).

Amersham Health, was the imaging diagnostics and therapy business of Amersham plc.

The rapid improvements in instrumentation, which have added benefit to the use of extracellular fluid agents such as Omniscan™, have also diminished the market potential for blood pool products such as Clariscan™. As a consequence, Amersham decided to discontinue the development of Clariscan™.

(EPI) Echo planar imaging is one of the early magnetic resonance imaging sequences (also known as Intascan), used in applications like diffusion, perfusion, and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Other sequences acquire one k-space line at each phase encoding step. When the echo planar imaging acquisition strategy is used, the complete image is formed from a single data sample (all k-space lines are measured in one repetition time) of a gradient echo or spin echo sequence (see single shot technique) with an acquisition time of about 20 to 100 ms. The pulse sequence timing diagram illustrates an echo planar imaging sequence from spin echo type with eight echo train pulses. (See also Pulse Sequence Timing Diagram, for a description of the components.)
In case of a gradient echo based EPI sequence the initial part is very similar to a standard gradient echo sequence. By periodically fast reversing the readout or frequency encoding gradient, a train of echoes is generated.
EPI requires higher performance from the MRI scanner like much larger gradient amplitudes. The scan time is dependent on the spatial resolution required, the strength of the applied gradient fields and the time the machine needs to ramp the gradients.
In EPI, there is water fat shift in the phase encoding direction due to phase accumulations. To minimize water fat shift (WFS) in the phase direction fat suppression and a wide bandwidth (BW) are selected. On a typical EPI sequence, there is virtually no time at all for the flat top of the gradient waveform. The problem is solved by "ramp sampling" through most of the rise and fall time to improve image resolution.
The benefits of the fast imaging time are not without cost. EPI is relatively demanding on the scanner hardware, in particular on gradient strengths, gradient switching times, and receiver bandwidth. In addition, EPI is extremely sensitive to image artifacts and distortions.

Argentina-based company, which distributes contrast media like Feridex I.V..

MRI Contrast Agents:

Pharmacyclics is a pharmaceutical company developing novel agents to improve current therapeutic approaches to cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and inflammation. The company's proprietary products are derived from its core technology in biometallic chemistry. These products under development are based upon small molecules, which bind metals in a unique way and are capable of capturing and focusing forms of energy used in a variety of medical applications. The company has one product in registration with the FDA, Gadolite® Oral Suspension, a contrast agent for imaging the gastrointestinal tract; two products in clinical development, Gd-Tex (Motexafin gadolinium), a radiation sensitizer, Lu-Tex, a photosensitizer; and several compounds in preclinical development.

MRI Contrast Agents:

Research Project Description
Lung Imaging X-ray and MRI contrast agents for lung MRI applications.
Blood Pool Imaging MRI contrast agents for vascular and targeted imaging.

Nuclear Imaging Agents based on recombinant human albumin for nuclear imaging.