DOTmed Industry Sector Report: X-ray Tubes and Image Intensifiers

by Keith Loria, Reporter | January 22, 2010

"Hospitals are really moving into flat panel technology, but depending on how busy they are, the smaller diagnostic centers are buying these remanufactured image intensifiers, since they don't do enough procedures to require the flat panel," says Bill Calderon, an engineer with Managed Medical Images. "The equipment is getting smaller and lighter which uses less facility space."

Babcock believes that as long as intensifiers still give the bang for the buck, they won't be going anywhere for awhile.

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"Some hospitals are still buying image intensifiers because of the high cost of a flat panel room," he says. "If they are just going to use if for conventional R&F, you don't need a half million dollar flat panel. One of our largest hospital groups just bought five new R&F rooms and every single one of them had a conventional image intensifier."

Lean and Green

One of the ways that Dunlee has helped reduce costs for the end users is by internally working on some cost-saving measures.

"We have done things in our factory such as automating processes that used to be manual," Kuehn says. "We've gone to lean manufacturing, which also reduces costs and we have become very good at recycling. Over time that really reduces the cost of the product."

There are some very expensive subcomponents in an X-ray tube since they are made out of precious metals and until a few years ago, many of these tubes were simply thrown away without any consideration of reuse or recycling.

"The tubes may fail for a different reason, so we are able to use these subcomponents and build them into new tubes, thus reducing our overall cost over time," Kuehn explains. "Also the housing that the tube is loaded into, by making them differently, we can reuse them more times because they are more robust."

As for the future, companies are working towards X-ray tubes designed to optimize the efficiency inherent in digital imaging, tubes that manage heat better, and can stand up to a shortened duty cycle.