General Electric to show its wares at Arab Health

GE Healthcare will showcase its latest technologies at Arab Health conference in Dubai.

General Electric Healthcare will display its latest technologies at this year's Arab Health exhibition in Dubai.

The products include a noiseless MRI machine used to view internal organs and an image-viewing machine for radiologists.

The scanning machine promises to reduce MRI system noise to what GE calls "near-ambient levels" for patient comfort. In the health informatics section, the American company will showcase a "universal viewer" - an imaging system for radiologists that would decrease the time physicians spend processing data - and other new imaging technology that can help to reduce coronary motion during a CT scan and avoid hardware related limitations.

"This year marks our largest presence at Arab Health with technologies that have been designed to address the challenges faced by the region," said Maher Abouzeid, GE Healthcare's president and chief executive for the Middle East and Pakistan.

The 38th edition of Arab Health, which begins on Monday and runs through January 31, is expected to draw 85,000 visitors from around the world.

GE Healthcare is a part of US-based General Electric with a market cap of US$231 billion (Dh848.4bn).

On Friday, GE announced that operating earnings rose 13 per cent to $4.7bn in last year's fourth quarter compared with the same period a year earlier.

The UAE healthcare sector is lucrative for global companies given the government's investment in medical infrastructure in recent years. The mandatory coverage policy for Abu Dhabi residents and several public-private healthcare projects in the UAE have driven the Emirates' annual per-capita healthcare spending to about $1,500 - the second-highest in the Arabian Gulf, according to a Deloitte report in June.

The figure is expected to grow at a rate of 5 per cent until 2014, it said.