GE HealthCare Adds Lung Guidance and AutoAS AI Capabilities to Vscan Air Handheld Ultrasound System
GE医疗 has announced two new AI-assisted capabilities for its Vscan Air handheld ultrasound system: Lung Guidance and AutoAS. Designed for clinicians evaluating patients with cardiac and respiratory symptoms at the point of care, the innovations are intended to support consistent lung ultrasound image acquisition and provide additional insights for the assessment of moderate-to-severe aortic stenosis (AS).
Patients presenting with symptoms such as shortness of breath can require clinicians to consider cardiac, pulmonary, or overlapping causes, often in time-pressured settings where formal imaging or specialist interpretation may not be immediately available. The Vscan Air cardiopulmonary suite of AI solutions, which already includes Caption AI for cardiac scan guidance and Caption Interpretation Auto EF for ejection fraction interpretation support, now expands to assist users with Lung Guidance for pulmonary assessment and AutoAS for valve disease assessment, bringing additional information closer to the initial point of assessment.
Lung Guidance provides real-time scan guidance to help clinicians optimize probe position and acquire diagnostic-quality lung images by guiding them to correct anatomical landmarks in each zone of the standard 8-zone lung protocol, detecting landmarks including the pleural line, A-lines, rib shadows, diaphragm, and abdomen. When predefined landmark and image-quality criteria are met, AutoCapture automatically records an ultrasound clip, and a Save Best Clip feature allows users to retain the best quality image from each view when AutoCapture conditions are not achieved. Lung Guidance additionally supports B-line detection and scoring, as well as reporting to help clinicians organize findings. In validation testing, Lung Guidance enabled non-expert lung ultrasound users to consistently acquire diagnostic-quality exams, with 95.2% success compared with 96.8% for expert users, per a descriptive assessment.
AutoAS is designed to provide an AI-assisted automated visual estimate of the presence or absence of moderate-to-severe AS using standard 2D cardiac images acquired with Vscan Air SL. With at least two compatible standard echocardiographic views, AutoAS analyzes the images and provides an estimate indicating whether findings are suggestive of moderate-to-severe AS, along with a confidence score indicating the algorithm’s certainty. AutoAS is intended to help clinicians make early assessments of AS when formal echocardiography is unavailable, and it was trained and validated using a reference panel of expert cardiologists. These capabilities are both 510(k)-cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and CE-marked. They are available for purchase through Vscan Air Innovation Packages in the United States and select countries. Existing Vscan Air customers with a valid Innovation Package subscription or license are expected to receive updates by the end of November 2026.
Karley Yoder, Chief Executive Officer of Ultrasound Solutions within Advanced Imaging Solutions at GE HealthCare, said clinicians at the point of care are often working with limited time and incomplete information, and that a symptom like shortness of breath rarely announces whether it is coming from the heart, the lungs, or both. Yoder noted that Lung Guidance and AutoAS are designed to shorten the distance between the initial physical assessment and a clear next step, putting AI-enabled tools in the hands of the clinician who is already with the patient.
