At AHRA this year, Carestream is showing off a prototype of its orthopedic cone beam CT solution. HCB News spoke to Jim Burns, the company's CTO, about what will set their offering apart from other CT and cone beam CT options on the market, how far away it is from commercialization, and how their dental product line helped inform the design.

HCB News: How long has this cone beam CT system been in development and what influenced Carestream to enter the market?

Jim Burns: It’s been in the works for overall about five years, including basic research that we had to do around the creation of the image itself as well as the patient positioner.
We got into cone beam CT because we believe there is a significant problem to be solved relative to the orthopedic market. The traditional multi-detector — MDCT — systems are large bore and great for general purpose but neither the patient positioner nor the image science itself is optimized for orthopedic extremities so we believe there’s a very significant problem to be solved in improving the imaging that’s done in orthopedic extremities.

HCB News: Can you describe the system's design?

JB: Well, it has a much smaller footprint than the conventional CT systems you might see in a hospital or imaging center, so you can put it in an office setting and plug it into a standard 120 volt outlet.

Also, we’re designing it such that additional shielding is not required, so you likely won’t have to put in lead walls like you would for conventional CT — but that final decision needs to ultimately be made by the customer in consultation with their physicist.

Another major benefit is that it will be able to do weight-baring exams. If you think about conventional CT, you lay down on the couch or table and you’re placed in the gantry.

So since you’re laying down you don’t get to understand diagnosis of the disease or the progression of healing for, say, a knee replacement, because you’re not evaluating that body part in a normal position. So it has that improved diagnostic value.

And unlike in conventional CT where both legs or arms have to go into the tunnel, with our device only the subject limb has to be exposed to X-ray.

HCB: It sounds like this could be useful in sports medicine.

JB: Because of its size, you can put it into an orthopedic office, professional or college sports locker room, or even have it at a stadium to provide immediate evaluation. It’s a 3-D device, so that means immediate 3-D image of the player’s knee or wrist or ankle. It turns out wrist and ankle are the most prevalent game-day injuries for say, an NFL team.

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