Imaging Targets Obesity-Related Disease

A widely accessible application has been designed to quantify quickly and accurately visceral adipose tissue (VAT) during body composition analysis.

GE Healthcare (Chalfont St. Giles, UK) announced US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 510k clearance of CoreScan. Hosted on GE Lunar's iDXA (dual-emission X-ray absorptiometry) body composition system, CoreScan provides patients and physicians an advanced tool to quantify VAT to help evaluate, manage, and treat obesity-related disease.

"CoreScan offers instant, precise, and reproducible fat-quantifying results that go beyond the bathroom scale," said Laura Stoltenberg, general manager of GE Healthcare's Lunar business. "As part of an iDXA body composition exam, CoreScan can help patients and physicians tailor individualized health and wellness plans while addressing the growing global danger of obesity-related disease."

With the number of obese individuals worldwide nearly doubling to more than half a billion over the last three decades, global healthcare spending on obesity-related disease is climbing. Medical care related to obesity costs the United States about US$168 billion annually, or more than 15% of national healthcare spending.

VAT is fat that surrounds abdominal organs. While VAT levels may not correlate with an individual's waist size or weight, excess VAT levels are linked to obesity, which has been shown to increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and other diseases.

"Quantification of visceral fat with a practical, patient-friendly application like CoreScan would transform our ability to accurately evaluate, treat and monitor patients," said Steven B. Heymsfield, MD, executive director of Pennington Biomedical Research Center (Baton Rouge, LA, USA). "This technology can also advance research and clinical approaches for overweight and obesity evaluation by providing improvements over existing clinical tools."

CoreScan technology gives healthcare professionals, in a range of clinical settings, immediate results that can help determine if a lifestyle intervention would benefit the patient.

CoreScan, a new application on GE Lunar iDXA body-composition systems, is designed to quantify a patient's VAT using a noninvasive, low-dose X-ray exam. GE's iDXA systems provide total and regional body composition assessments of fat tissue, lean tissue, and bone mineral content in an easy-to-interpret report. Available for adults of nearly every age and size, CoreScan reports from an iDXA exam can help healthcare professionals manage VAT and obesity-related disease--including hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia, and metabolic syndrome.

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