GE Medical Systems had a terrific year in 2001 – with earnings up 15%, strong double-digit growth in every region of the world and several acquisitions that will allow us to serve our customers better than ever before.

By leveraging Six Sigma to develop innovative products and services, GE Medical's global team is relentlessly focused on creating the quality, speed and efficiency critical to the success of our healthcare customers. Healthcare experts around the world choose GE more than any other medical technology provider. We take great pride in knowing that GE's equipment is being used somewhere in the world every second of the day. From Berlin to Boston, Budapest to Beijing, our technology is helping to make people's lives better.

China, with 50% annual growth, is quickly becoming the world's second-largest healthcare marketplace, and GE Medical has become China's premier developer of medical technology.

Central to our business strategy is helping doctors find a better way. By developing Designed for Six Sigma products, which now account for more than 60% of GE Medical's sales, we can innovate faster and more precisely meet customer requirements.

A great example of the power of DFSS is our breakthrough Discovery™ LS PET/CT system. This technology allows doctors in a single scan to see a tumor, confirm if it is cancerous or not, and determine the best course of treatment – eliminating the need for multiple examinations that may take weeks or months to perform.

 We have achieved similar success with the LightSpeed™ Ultra, the world's fastest CT system; the Signa™ Twinspeed MRI, the only MRI system capable of performing both radiology and cardiology examinations; and a complete new family of radiology and cardiology ultrasound systems.

Six Sigma also enabled GE Medical to create Centricity RIS/PACS, the world's first integrated information and image archiving system, to address the growing demand for greater information management efficiency in radiology departments. GE Medical, with support from Qwest Communications, will extend Centricity's availability to small and mid-size hospitals through the creation of a broadband fiberoptic ASP model.

Because access to quality medical care is a growing issue, GE Medical has partnered with Johns Hopkins Medical Center to create a mobile screening center for our revolutionary Senographe 2000D full-field digital mammography system to demonstrate that advanced medical technology can serve remote and underserved areas as well as population centers.

Adding new technology to our portfolio is critical to our customers, and GE Medical completed several important acquisitions in 2001. Among them were cardiac CT leader Imatron, Inc., 3-D ultrasound pioneer Kretztechnik, and Data Critical, a leader in wireless information technology for healthcare. GE Medical also secured a number of alliances and acquisitions to build its capability in the rapidly growing field of molecular imaging and genomics.

By bringing Six Sigma to our customers, we can forever improve the business of healthcare. In 2001, we completed more than 3,000 Six Sigma projects focused on improving clinical efficiency at customer facilities, and these efforts helped our customers save more than $50 million.

 We are fortunate to be living in a time of unprecedented change in medicine. Never in history has there been such a concentration of breakthrough medical advances, including exciting areas like image-guided surgery, pre-symptomatic disease detection and the development of "smart" drugs. This trend has resulted in a dynamic $700 billion market for advanced medical technology.

 We believe that GE Medical's growth is unlimited. We have created a magnificent portfolio of diagnostic technology, information and service offerings that places us at the forefront of medical innovation today and for many years to come.

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