Find Out Why GE HealthCare Chose Cincinnati: Q&A with MR Clinical Solutions General Manager Anja Brau

GE HealthCare recently announced plans to establish a new co-located MRI Research and Development center of excellence on UC’s medical campus in Cincinnati. The new academic-industrial collaboration between GE HealthCare, University of Cincinnati, UC Health, and Cincinnati Children’s aims to develop next-generation MRI hardware and software focused on adult and pediatric patients’ unique clinical needs.

Tyler Allchin, Managing Director of Healthcare at JobsOhio, recently sat down with Anja Brau, General Manager of MR Clinical Solutions and Research Collaborations at GE HealthCare, to discuss why the company chose Cincinnati and hear about some of the innovations in MR the team at GE HealthCare is working on.

Tyler: Can you tell us about your leadership role at GE Healthcare and the work that you do?

Anja: I’m a general manager for our (Magnetic Resonance) MR Clinical Solutions team. We are responsible for designing the MR, the way the MR runs, and the features and applications capabilities for imaging patients well and answering the clinical questions that referring physicians have.

To do that, we need to work closely with our customers and collaborators to understand their needs and design for them, then iterate with them on possible solutions. A big part of my role is also research collaborations and working with partner sites in the U.S. and around the world to accomplish that.

Tyler: You recently announced a new innovation center in Cincinnati. Can you give us some insight into the work you’re excited about with this new partnership?

Anja: We recently announced that we will be establishing a new GE HealthCare R&D center in Cincinnati, and this will be focused on MR. The idea is to work with local institutions, including University of Cincinnati, UC Health, and Cincinnati Children’s, to focus on how we develop MR technology and leverage each other’s expertise to design solutions that work for their patient populations.

We know that MRI is a great technology to perform diagnosis of those patients, but we want to also screen patients earlier, predict to catch disease earlier, or use MRI to monitor treatment. How is a patient responding to treatment? We’re really excited about establishing a footprint for GE HealthCare in Cincinnati that would allow us to focus on innovation and development with clinical partners.

Tyler: You have opportunities to have partnerships with a lot of institutions and geographies across the globe. What was exciting about the partnership in Cincinnati, and what were you looking for in the next R&D Center?

Anja: Research and development are crucial to innovation, and we’re always looking to expand what our equipment and devices are capable of. When we look for partners to work with, we look for sites that have a track record of clinical excellence and are committed to delivering excellent patient care and innovating in patient care.

We think that in Cincinnati, there’s a fantastic STEM talent pool and a lot of universities and training facilities that produce great talent that we can work with. There’s a strong track record in research and the ability to test new concepts and deploy them. A site that is experienced in running clinical studies, has the infrastructure to manage that, and is passionate about sharing our vision for where our market goes – we get excited when those elements align as we found in this partnership.

Tyler: R&D Centers have historically been coastal. Was that also part of the strategy to do something here in the Midwest?

Anja: Yes, absolutely.We have established these applied science lab (ASL) groups. We typically do a lot of R&D in our engineering and manufacturing centers globally, which tend to be more hardware-focused. However, when it comes to designing a system's clinical use and the needed applications, we have found that co-locating a group of scientists in the field close to our customers really accelerates development. We ensure we’re focusing on the right clinical questions but can also iterate quickly.

We have experience with these ASL groups around the world. General Electric has a historical presence in Ohio, and our GE HealthCare manufacturing site in Aurora is where we design and manufacture an essential part of our MR scanner, the radiofrequency coils.

We found that Cincinnati would be a great environment to build another ASL and expand our presence in Ohio with a new set of partners that bring a different type of patient population and clinical and engineering expertise.

Tyler: Can you give us a look ahead of what comes next and how these R&D efforts fit into what you and your team have planned?

Anja: GE HealthCare spun out of General Electric early last year, and our mission is to combine the three Ds. Regarding where medical imaging is going, we think of “devices” excellence in devices. The second “D” is “data” and “digital technology,” and the third is “disease.” So, how do we bring all those elements together to care for patients? What does that mean for imaging? We will continue to deploy digital and AI technologies into imaging to make it faster, higher quality, and more consistent. These continue to be pain points for sites, and AI has a powerful role to play. We already have several great examples of that in our MR product, and we're really proud. My team has developed things like what we call “Air Recon DL,” which is a deep learning technology for MR reconstruction, which makes the images clearer.

Earlier this year, we launched something called “Sonic DL.” DL is for deep learning reconstruction that can help to accelerate the scan time so the patient spends less time on the table. But also importantly, when you scan faster, that opens up the access of that exam to more types of actions, and that's tremendously important. Faster scans can also help to scan more patients. We keep trying to point the lens of AI and solve problems like that.

We’re also working on getting MR images that are more quantitative and yield more insights about the patient's condition by virtue of how we’re probing the tissue with MR. MR has a fantastic imaging modality that is incredibly rich. Typically, we just display images in shades of gray, which gives you a nice indication of the anatomical boundaries. You can see nice soft tissue and soft tissue differentiation, but we typically don't look at the numbers that are reflected in the pixels, and there's tremendous information in that. Increasingly, we're seeing imaging techniques that will extract quantitative numbers that are then actionable for how we treat the patient.

Tyler: You get to spend a lot of time in many different markets on the R&D side. We’d love to know what your experience was with us in Ohio and the role economic development partners play in helping get this done.

Anja: We were really grateful to JobsOhio for creating an Innovation District and being a real thought leader – bringing industry partners together with institutions and universities to foster this type of innovative activity. This is the first time I’ve been involved with a state-level economic development organization in this way, and I’m really impressed with the structure and facilitation of this type of research and development activities. We’re really excited to be a partner with JobsOhio and how they’ve helped just bring us all to the table and see what we could do together.

Tyler: Going back to the beginning of your career, what inspired you to be a scientist and work in imaging?

Anja: Early on, I realized I have an engineer’s brain. I like understanding how things work and putting together better solutions. I was also interested in healthcare and how the body works. When you’re a kid, your parents say, “Great, then you should be a doctor.” They don’t say, “You should be an engineer,” or at least that wasn’t my experience. I soon realized going to school that I don’t have a calling to be a physician, but if I can apply the way my brain works well, which is building things and apply it to healthcare, wouldn’t that be the best combination for me, to have a career impact the world around me?

My advice to people would be if that sounds like you, if you like to build things and you like to impact people’s lives, STEM is such a great place to work, especially in healthcare, because the impact is not 1:1. We’re building things that we then deliver into products and deploy to thousands of sites around the world. We’re present in 160 countries, and then you touch the lives of thousands of people every day. It’s just impossibly rewarding to have a career, and that’s what’s kept me interested in staying in this line of work.

Learn more about internships or starting a STEM career with GE HealthCare.