GE HealthCare expands medical imaging equipment production

Supporting Wisconsin’s efforts in personalized medicine, GE HealthCare is now manufacturing the company’s latest Omni Legend imaging scanners in Waukesha.

Medical imaging is a crucial tool for diagnosing disease, identifying a course of treatment, and determining whether therapy is successful for millions of patients.

The quality of imaging can make the difference between finding a small lesion early or in its later stages, potentially affecting patient outcomes and disease management. For this reason, GE HealthCare says, clinicians are increasingly adopting imaging and Artificial Intelligence-based solutions for enhanced quality compared with standard care.

The manufacturing expansion marks the first North American production site for Omni Legend PET/CT imaging equipment, which GE HealthCare says enables faster scan times and image optimization.

Production of the machines started in September at the Waukesha south operations plant, and the first Omni Legend system from Waukesha was shipped Wednesday. More than 250 employees support work at the plant and there won't be a need for additional hiring, the company said.

"We are leveraging the highly skilled workforce we already have," the company said in an email to the Journal Sentinel.

GE HealthCare said its manufacturing expansion in Waukesha, is supported by a partnership with Wisconsin BioHealth Tech Hub and BioForward Wisconsin.

The partnership seeks to expand manufacturing, data sharing, and lab space while advancing breakthroughs in genomics, imaging, and big-data analytics in personalized medicine.

Eighteen public and private entities, including Medical College of Wisconsin and Milwaukee Area Technical College, are slated to share $49 million in federal funding for the biohealth hub centered on personalized medicine, an emerging form of health care based on an individual's unique genetic makeup.

The funding, announced this summer from the U.S. Department of Commerce, was part of $504 million awarded for a dozen tech hubs spanning 14 states.

Wisconsin, Indiana and New Hampshire will focus on biosciences and medicine. Other states will pursue clean energy, microchip manufacturing, and climate-change resistant infrastructure.

Over the first 10 years, the Wisconsin hub is projected to create 30,062 jobs in personalized medicine, including 11,673 in targeted radiation therapy and 12,792 in genomic medicine, an emerging field of medicine which, among other things, can predict whether someone is likely to develop an inherited condition later in life even if they don't yet have symptoms.

Medical College of Wisconsin, based in Wauwatosa, plans to use some of the money to create a fleet of mobile cancer-screening units in underserved communities in the state.