by
Kathy Mahdoubi, Senior Correspondent | May 13, 2010
CT's newest wares
The most advanced systems are going for about $2 million and many 64-slice systems are selling for under $1 million now.
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Representative of most major CT manufacturers, Toshiba offers a range of scanners, including a 16, 32, 64 and 160-slice system, as well as the staggering 320-slice CT system dubbed the Aquilion One, which was released just shy of reimbursement cuts in November, 2007. That's not to say that no one is buying. The pull of the Aquilion One is that it can reportedly image an entire organ in a single gantry rotation.
"Our 320 can actually assess stroke in less than 5 minutes," says Young, "with about half to a quarter of the dose of a 64 CT scan."
Philips Healthcare has expanded their Brilliance CT line last year with two new configurations for cost-conscious facilities - the Brilliance iCT SP and the MX 16-slice system. The company is paying attention to increased demand for lower level slice systems.
"Product mix varies by clinical need and/or focus and geography," notes Jason Plante, director of global CT field marketing for Philips Healthcare. "For example, in North America, CT sales (by revenue) are pretty evenly split among 16-slice, 32-slice and 64-slice systems. In some emerging markets, on the other hand, there is a much greater proportion of 16-slice and below sales."
Market-share leader GE Healthcare has come out with two major developments for the company's Discovery CT750 HD, a 64-slice system released in October 2008. At the most recent RSNA, GE introduced Gemstone Spectral Imaging (GSI), a dual-energy application employing a garnet-based scintillator. The new application allows a multitude of user-selectable energy levels and GE says the new detector is capable of acquiring images 100 times faster with heart imaging registering in as much as 47 percent greater detail.
"When we launched the HD the main thing was having a brand new detector material," says Nilesh Shah, global marketing leader for GE Healthcare CT Systems. "It was about 10 years in the making."
GE also introduced ASIR, which stands for Adaptive Statistical Iterative Reconstruction, a new post-processing technique that has shown to dramatically reduce image noise and lower dose.
