by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | March 18, 2016
From the March 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
The Gates Vascular Institute, a Buffalo, N.Y., facility that opened in 2012 and offers stroke, cardiac and vascular care, uses the Infinix Select Dual Plane system. Lorie Mariano, senior director of cardiovascular services at the institute, says the system offers flexibility for different patient volumes in five different specialties, especially as cardiac volumes have gone down across the country.
When the institute was in the planning stages, nine cardiac labs were needed, but after it opened they needed another vascular lab, Mariano says. Vascular specialists can use the system’s larger 12-inch-by-16- inch detector without compromising image quality. “As volumes go up and down in different specialties, I can make a cardiac lab into a vascular lab or a vascular lab into a neuro lab,” Mariano says. “It allows cath lab administrators to be a little more flexible and take out a room and put in a new room when volumes change.”
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Beat goes on for radiation dose concerns
Reducing radiation exposure continues to be an important topic, especially in a sector that utilizes imaging to the extent that interventional cardiology does. Philips provides onscreen dosimetry parameters and launched its DoseWise Portal — which collects information on radiation exposure to patients and staff, and provides alerts when the dose is excessive — at RSNA in 2014 after a marketing partnership with Radimetrics.
Toshiba also offers its angiography Dose Tracking System (DTS), which shows a live image of the dose being delivered to a patient’s skin and provides a color-coded map that shows if the dose is in a dangerous area. It also offers Spot Fluoroscopy, which allows clinicians to look at a specific area live, while seeing previous images of the surrounding area, and Live Zoom, which digitally magnifies the fluoroscopic image to provide an enlarged view without changing system magnification modes.
GE offers Dose Map, which alerts clinicians to cumulative dose levels during an exam, as well as a technology it calls InnovaSense, which uses a detector to assess movement of the gantry and select the best position for the image receptor relative to the patient. By reducing the distance from the receptor to the patient, the system optimizes imaging geometry and helps reduce radiation exposure while capturing the best image, says Miranda Rasenberg, global interventional marketing manager at GE.
“The InnovaSense is basically automating something that physicians can forget during procedures,” Rasenberg says. “When you look at how they operate the system, interventional radiologists, interventional cardiologists or surgeons forget to or do not spend the time to bring the detector back down to as close to the patient as possible. Technically, all physicians understand how dose works and that lowering the detector would reduce it, but when they get in a cath lab and start placing stents and guidewires, in the heat of the moment, they are logically more focused on the procedure and patients and tend less on this type of dose physics.
