by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | December 21, 2015
From the December 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
One of the major concerns about using CT is the radiation dose. To address that, Toshiba built its Adaptive Iterative Dose Reduction 3D (AIDR 3D) technology into the system, which has been shown to lower radiation exposure by up to 75 percent compared to traditional filtered back projection reconstruction.
With the technology, MUMC was able to maintain lower dose for any patient shape and size without compromising image quality. It was especially useful for pediatric patients because of the harmful effects that radiation can have on children. Many of the other major manufacturers offer iterative reconstruction technology for their CT systems. Philips Healthcare has its iDose 4 iterative reconstruction technique, GE has its ASiR dose reduction technology and Siemens has its ADMIRE technology.
ADMIRE, which is Siemens’ third-generation iterative reconstruction technology, makes images appear as though the patient has received 100 percent dose, despite the fact that the dose has been significantly reduced, says Christine Ziemba-Landon, CT product manager at Siemens. “Even though we have reduced the radiation dose upfront, ADMIRE allows us to clean that image up, reduce artifacts and give them the appearance of a really nice image,” she adds. To significantly reduce the dose, ADMIRE is combined with Siemens’ Stellar Detector, X-CARE and CARE kV technologies. “The industry is saying, ‘You need to reduce radiation,’ and the only way you can do that is by using dose reduction features,” says Ziemba-Landon.
When patients with metal prosthetics or gunshot-wound victims with bullets inside their body require CT exams, physicians usually have to accept that the image quality will suffer. The metal artifacts can hide anatomical structures that the physicians need to see.
However, Toshiba’s Single Energy Metal Artifact Reduction (SEMAR) technology minimizes the streaks and artifacts on images that metal objects cause. MUMC was able to provide more information to the radiologists, which led to more accurate diagnoses and better overall outcomes for the patients. The Aquilion ONE can perform a cardiac CT in one rotation or .35 seconds, compared to standard CTs that can do that in five to six seconds. In addition, it provides 16 centimeters of coverage compared to typical scanners, which only cover four centimeters.
Time equals brain
CT is not only making strides inside of the hospital — it’s also starting to be used in ambulances for stroke patients. The trend originally started a few years ago in Germany, but it is now making its way to the U.S. Cleveland Clinic, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center and the University of Colorado Hospital are a few of the institutions leading the way with this concept. Cleveland Clinic deployed its first mobile stroke unit in June 2014 equipped with Neurologica’s CereTom mobile CT scanner.
