AV hospital home to only machine of its kind in California
From Staff Reports
St. Joseph Health, St. Mary is now home to the only digital tomosynthesis machine in California, the hospital announced last week. Costing roughly $1 million, the new machine is nearly as good as MRI for detecting signs of rheumatoid arthritis and bone erosion, and outperforms standard conventional radiology, officials say.
The machine delivers a much lower dose of radiation than MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) or CT (computed tomography) scans. A tomosynthesis image is typically 1/10 the dose of radiation as a CT scan, said Frank Serrao, manager of business development marketing for Shimadzu Medical Systems, which manufactures the Sonialvision Safire. The versatility of the machine allows for treatment of bariatric patients and myriad other procedures including early detection of rheumatoid arthritis, which can prevent permanent joint damage.
Serrao said it’s also great for weight-bearing injuries that don’t show up on a CT scan due to the fact that the patient must be lying down.
In 2010, California legislators became concerned about accidental overdoses of radiation in CT scans and enacted legislation that requires doses from all diagnostic CT scans to be included in patient records and reported to the state.
“It’s going to be a big advantage for patients we wouldn’t be able to see otherwise,” said Lisa Grogan, supervisor of imaging services. “It’s exciting to get equipment here that can improve our quality of care that folks can’t find anywhere else in the region.”
The machine takes about four seconds to do an entire sweep of a patient’s body, or specific portion of the body creating up to 75 images and reconstructing them on a computer for examination. Serrao describes it as similar to old silent movies, where several still images are flipped together fast to create a movie. In this case it’s a 3D movie of which any frame can be more thoroughly examined by a clinician.
In a recent study conducted by the American Journal of Roentgenology (Radiology), Japanese researchers found that tomosynthesis could be used to screen patients for arthritis, with better sensitivity than conventional x-ray but without the high cost of MRI.
“It’s an imaging technology that fuses X-ray, CT reconstruction with digital imaging process that allows you to obtain multiple images from a single acquisition,” said Serrao.