It is official! Toshiba’s new Aquilion One scanner is out! After 10 years and 500 millions dollars of development, new 320-slice scanners are going online in select hospitals in three major U.S. cities: Baltimore, Boston and Las Vegas. Toshiba gets the last laugh having been previously outpaced by one of its major competitors, Philips Medical Systems. The technological details are impressive:
- It uses 320 ultra-high-resolution x-ray detectors, each half a millimeter wide
- The detector rotates every 350 msec
- Single pass of the brain provides the volumetric data to produce CT angiogram, venogram, digital subtraction angiogram, and whole-brain perfusion images
- A whole heart can be captured in a single rotation
- All this with even less radiation burden on the patient
According to the official website your hospital may save considerable amounts of money, if this machine is used in events such as acute chest pain and stroke. For example, in practice this is how it would work out. Let’s suppose a patient comes in with acute chest pain. You examine him, take an ECG reading, order a CT scan, or a nuclear stress scan, and then finally send him to intervention cardiology, where he receives his proper treatment (a stent for example). It is estimated that all this would cost around twice as much (and much more time) as having him lay down in an Aquilion One, and then send him to intervention. I see their point, but I think that this does not hold for all cases as implied by the company website. The emphasis should be on proper events!
By the end of the day it is about people’s lives and correct diagnosis, so I am happy that new advances in technology are helping us achieve those goals easier. If anybody has any images taken with such a high resolution scanner (does not necessarily have to be with this particular type), please email it to us!
Further reading:
– Andras
