News Release

GE Healthcare and St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center, Phoenix announce research agreement

Collaboration expected to advance healthcare research in the areas of Alzheimer's disease, neuroscience, and non-invasive surgery technologies

Business Announcement

St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center

GE Healthcare announced today that the company has signed a six-year research agreement with St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center to establish a landmark alliance in medical research. The agreement is expected to advance personalized healthcare by accelerating joint research efforts and quickly transitioning those discoveries into the clinical environment.

"This announcement marks the launch of a significant collaboration between two leaders in healthcare and academic research capable of leveraging world-class technology and world-class medical research to meet the healthcare challenges of the future," said John Chiminski, vice president and general manager of GE Healthcare's global magnetic resonance business.

According to leaders at both organizations, this research alliance will focus on a number of groundbreaking technologies, including the continuation of new MR applications. James Pipe, Ph.D., a bioengineer at Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's, developed a new method that allows technologists to obtain clearer MR scans with less sensitivity to patient motion. This breakthrough technology, called PROPELLER (Periodically Rotated Overlapping ParallEL Lines with Enhanced Reconstruction) has been incorporated into all of GE Healthcare's Signa HD (High Definition) MR scanners. For the first time, PROPELLER provides physicians with unprecedented image clarity in cases involving patients who are difficult to scan due to their movement (this includes children who have traditionally required sedation to undergo scans and Parkinson's patients).

"We are excited about this agreement with GE and the potential it holds for research," said Linda Hunt, president of St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center. "Using GE's premium technology in both the research and clinical environments and having GE scientists as collaborators should significantly shorten the cycle time for St. Joseph's to clinically implement new MR applications."

GE Healthcare provides a broad portfolio of medical imaging and information technologies, patient monitoring systems and healthcare services. From ultrasound to MR to surgical navigation, GE provides industry-leading technologies that allow clinicians to see inside the human body more clearly than ever before.

"Through our collaboration with St. Joseph's, we're investing in the future of healthcare," said Chiminski. "This collaboration embodies our vision of accelerating personalized medicine from discovery to practice, as we develop more effective methods of diagnosing, treating and monitoring disease."

As part of St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center and GE's comprehensive research agreement, St. Joseph's will provide principle investigators, support personnel and dedicated research facilities. GE will provide two product development engineers, annual funding and a portion of all royalties.

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About St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center
St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center is a nationally recognized center for quality tertiary care, medical education and research. It includes the internationally known Barrow Neurological Institute, a Level I Trauma Center, the Children's Health Center at St. Joseph's and the Heart & Lung Institute at St. Joseph's. The hospital actively participates in ongoing clinical and basic neuroscience research to further the prevention and treatment of brain, nerve and spinal cord diseases and injuries. St. Joseph's Neuroscience Research Center is a world-class facility that features state-of-the-art technology and a research staff who specialize in basic research in the areas of neuro-oncology, neurology and neurosurgery.

About GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform and treat disease, so their patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases, and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $15 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 43,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com.

GE Healthcare
Brian McKaig
262-544-3937
brian.mckaig@ge.com


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