From the December 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


The unit looks like an ambulance on the outside, but inside it is equipped with a portable CT scanner and a staff made up of a paramedic, critical care nurse, CT technologist and EMS driver. The CT is used to image the patient’s brain and determine whether the stroke is caused by a blood clot or ruptured blood vessel.

If a blood clot is the cause, the medical team can administer the intravenous tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) within three hours to try to break up the clot and that may improve the chance of recovery. TPA is currently underutilized since mobile stroke units are not yet the standard of care and only a small portion of patients arrive at the ED within three hours of the time they were last known to be well, according to the Massachusetts Department of Health and Human Services. UTHealth’s mobile stroke unit is also equipped with the CereTom CT.


At the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference 2015 in March, UTHealth reported that it was able to administer stroke treatment within 10 to 18 minutes of arrival and that over the course of nine weeks, two patients per week were treated with tPA and 40 percent were treated within the first hour from onset.

Mobile stroke units are equipped with portable CTs because of their small footprint, but Siemens Healthcare has a mobile stroke unit currently in production that is equipped with its SOMATOM Scope CT, which received FDA approval in September 2014. Even though it’s not a mobile system, it only requires 130.2 square feet of space.

“The idea behind it is that you can potentially eliminate spending time in the ED in situations where time plays a critical factor in positive outcomes,” says Dena Bobbett, product manager of neuroradiology and emergency department CT marketing at Siemens. “You could go straight to CT if you wanted to get a neuro perfusion study or you could go straight to the angiography suite.”

Nearly automatic ultrasound
Just like CT, ultrasound is also making its way into ambulances. Last year, six emergency vehicles in the Dallas and Forth Worth metropolitan areas deployed Samsung Electronic America’s PT60A ultrasound to diagnose trauma, internal bleeding, acute abdominal pain and cardiac arrest. During a trial that started in July 2014, the emergency vehicles made 91 emergency calls by October. In one case, a patient was experiencing abdominal pain and the paramedics used the PT60A and found the patient’s liver was bleeding.

The paramedics transmitted those images, in real time with Trice Imaging’s mobile encryption and image management system, to the hospital and the staff was able to make sure the right specialists would b available when the patient arrived. For point-of-care ultrasound systems used inside of the hospital, there is a trend toward a fit-for-purpose ultrasound designed specifically for the emergency space. Ultrasound systems are also being designed specifically for the critical care and anesthesia fields.

December 2015 Magazine

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