GE Healthcare has announced the launch of its latest preclinical computed tomography imaging technology.

It said its new CT scanner - the GE eXplore CT120 - can image a rodent's heart beating at 600 beats-per-minute and is designed to speed up research in drug development and research into cardiac disease.

The scanner uses x-ray source technology derived from clinical systems and features 100 times the output of previous research imaging systems from the company.

It adds this power facilitates the more effective filtering of x-ray beams to lower the dose of radiation the subject is submitted to while reducing scan time.

The user software of the scanner is designed for throughput and makes the scanner four times faster than previous designs.

Professor Andre Constantinesco, of Hopitaux Universitaires de Strasbourg, said: "Morphological imaging is the key to understanding cardiac kinetics."

He added the scanner provides the ability to get four-dimensional high-resolution datasets in living mice to enhance medical understanding of the quantification of rodent models of cardiac diseases.

In June 2008, GE Healthcare showcased a number of evolutions in molecular imaging technology at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists in Chicago.