The status of the GE approach to the digital catheterization laboratory.

The digital cardiac catheterization laboratory has become a reality. The cardiac catheterization community has embraced the DICOM standard as the vehicle for filmless archiving of cardiac angiographic studies. General Electric Medical Systems (GE) provides a completely scaleable offering for filmless archiving with the GEMnet product line. The GEMnet philosophy: practicality, scaleability, reliability and upgradeability. Practicality is conforming to standards. Standards in imaging data format and communications. Scaleability of a system configuration maximizes the dollar spent to match the right system to the patient volume of a department. Reliability is a fault tolerant design, redundancy of data to insure system up-time and advanced system diagnostics to speed service time. Upgradeability is keeping pace with the evoluation of new technologies to take advantage of increases in performance and reductions in price.