NRMC gets new equipment

Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Student X-ray technician Amy Smith demonstrates the new Fluoroscopy Tomography machine at Nevada Regional Medical Center. The hospital put the machine into operation Aug. 31. In addition to improved technology, the machine offers the ablility to handle patients up to 500 pounds.

The diagnostic imaging department at Nevada Regional Medical Center has a new machine, a fluoroscopy tomography machine, that the hospital began using Aug. 31.

"Fluoroscopy is live imaging, you can watch the image of someone swallowing barium, you can see it live," Gary Headrick, head of Diagnostic Imaging, said. "Tomography is the same as computerized tomography, or CT, but it's just one sweep so you're just looking at one slice. With CT you get a much broader picture."

PACS Administrator/Clinical Coordinator Todd Fine said a good way to think of it was that the image was in 'real time'.

The hospital has had machines that perform the same functions, but this machine modernizes them and has features lacking in machines the hospital had in the past.

"We've had each of these modalities previous to this," Headrick said. "Of course this is current technology and the combination is a little smoother than the old one but the old did it; it's just an easier way of getting the end results."

The machine can be used with several types of procedures; from barium swallow to needle placement; the machine provides an immediate view of what is happening inside the body.

"For needle placement, for exams where they have to insert a needle, they can see live where you're not taking a still picture, looking at it and then advancing the needle, and then taking yet another picture," Fine said. "You can watch it in real time."

For a permanent record the machine is all digital and film is no longer used.

"It's all digital now so there are no plates to change out," Fine said. "We can acquire images up to eight images a second. Before we were limited to one exposure. With barium studies with this you are going to capture the esophagus full of barium because you can get eight frames a second. That's a pretty big advancement over the last machine."

While you can send the images created on the machine to other doctors to view, there is a catch. They have to have the same software as the sending facility.

"There are several different software programs to view images and whoever you're sending the images to has to have that same software package," Fine said. "So all your vendors; GE, Agfa, Fuji, Kodak, Siemans and then you have the small ones, each of them has different software to view images. If the physician you send them to doesn't have the same software we can burn that on a disk and send it to them. The disk permits anyone who has a CD drive to view the images."

Fine said another good thing about the machine was that it could handle larger patients than the older one.

"Another good thing about this machine is that it's a bariatric machine," Fine said. "Our table limit now goes from 350 pounds to 500 pounds -- and that was a capability we didn't have before."

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