Category: Work stuff

Is it really? For imaging equipment it can be sometimes, up to a certain point. For gamma cameras, more heads is better because it shortens the acquisition time. Once you get up to 4 heads though, you start to run into practical limits like weight and head size.
There’s a new CT scanner in the house from a big German company that starts with an S. It’s not just any ordinary CT scanner though. This one has two x-ray tubes instead of the usual one. I missed the installation phase when the covers were off so I didn’t get to peek inside the gantry to see how things were arranged. I would imagine that the tubes are arranged on opposite sides and slightly offset along the Z-axis (going into the gantry) so that instead of covering the regular 20-30 mm beam width, this thing probably covers twice that. That means it can acquire twice the data in a single rotation. It also means potentially twice the radiation dose to the patient.
Apparently a dual tube scanner proved useful enough to turn it into a commercial product. I’ll get my hands on it today and put it through a few checks. It will be interesting to see how this thing performs. Once the apps people come through and set up some clinical techniques, it will be very interesting to see how the radiation dose compares to our other scanners. The timing is pretty good, since it’s time for the annual survey on the CT scanners anyway. I’ll be able to get some current data for the dose comparisons.

I have a few gripes with x-ray equipment manufacturers when it comes to their digital radiography (DR) offerings.

• The technique controls are terrible. If you’re going to make the technologists tap buttons on a touch screen to change the technique settings, give them the option of entering values into a text field instead of having to tap tap tap on the screen all the time. I want to go from 60 to 120 kVp without having to tap the screen a million times.
• Give me a way to turn off the stupid collimation mask applied to the images. It’s aggravating when I can’t see something at the edge of the radiation field because it’s blacked out by the mask.
• Give me some kind of reasonably easy to access service mode so I can see the unprocessed images (or at least an image with a linear greyscale applied to it) and enter arbitrary x-ray techniques. Some of the pre-programmed modes are too pre-programmed.
• Include a screen calibration routine for your FSE’s and make it part of the installation and PM procedures. It’s very annoying when you tap on a button and the computer thinks you’ve tapped somewhere else.

Something called Scenium landed in my lap today. No, it’s not a new game. It’s some kind of image analysis software for doing analysis on PET brain scans. Currently we’re doing qualitative analysis on SPECT and PET images using some software from Hermes Medical.
Haven’t found a great deal of info on this new Scenium package yet, and what I have found doesn’t tell me much about how it works or what it does. I’ve got a couple of CDs, so maybe there’s something interesting on those.
It’ll have to wait until I get back from vacation though.

There’s a new beast sitting in the radiopharmacy lab at work called a BVA-100 that’s supposed to revolutionize the way blood volume studies are performed. The old way is a labour intensive process that took about 3-4 hours to complete. This new machine can do it in about 60-90 minutes with 6 blood draws. I haven’t had a chance to familiarize myself with the entire procedure, but it looks pretty simple and is a lot less work. Patient is injected with about 20-40 μCi of I-131 HSA and 6 blood samples are drawn at regular time intervals. Blood is spun down, plasma removed and put into 2x1mL test tubes which are placed in the machine. The computer takes care of getting all the samples counted and spitting out the results.
It’s pretty neat and is supposed to be helpful for a few different things like finding appropriate treatments for hypertension. The company came to our nuc med radiologists to get us to try the unit out for a 3 month demo period, which considering our current volume of blood volume study requests was hard to justify. Once their sales guys figured out the people to go to were the cardiologists, those guys were all over it and immediately requested us to proceed with the demo. We just got through with the installation and training period and have done 2 or 3 patients so far with good results and positive response from the techs. If it gets a similar response from the cardiologists and spreads to other potential referring docs, the machine might stick around. The one big downside I’ve been told is that the consumables have to be purchased from the company and is a little on the pricey side. That’s something I leave for te administrators to worry about though.
I’ll have to see about finding some time to become a little more familiar with this thing.

Darn, the abstract I submitted for this year’s SNM meeting didn’t get accepted. No trip to San Diego for me this year.

Still working on the accompanying paper, so maybe I can get that published somewhere.

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