Courtney Lane of Innovative X-Ray Services said, "We will provide sales and service of any brand. We outsource our parts so that we can provide the facility with better pricing. We offer service at any level, particularly if we do the installation. With each installation we provide a one-year service pack." The company also offers packages from time and materials to full service to hospitals, clinics and private practitioners who use the company's pre-owned and refurbished systems.

Another good reason for a hospital to have an ISO on tap is for those unexpected emergencies where your internal biomedical team needs parts and service support. "I had a machine go down on the 24th of December last year and was able to get a guy out to the hospital to get it up and running on Christmas Day," Metropolis International's Gugel said.


CR - The best of both worlds

While direct digital mammography may be unaffordable to many hospitals as of yet, there is an option to keep the older film units and add computed radiography (CR), which converts the film images to digital files. These can then be stored and shared readily as well as interpreted by today's computer aided detection (CAD) software systems.

"It's the best of both worlds. You get the benefit of the higher sensitivity of film screen plus some of the things that computers do on the digital side," Dr. Cooper said. He explained that the CR converted mammograms are read by extremely
sophisticated software. "The computer performs about a billion calculations per film and has in its memory many different presentations of cancer. It 'looks' for those things on the digitized mammogram image."

CAD provides a second opinion to radiologists, improving cancer detection by about 25 percent. In an era with a shortage of radiologists, and fewer going into mammography due to low pay and high liability, computers perform a useful service. (The way it works in practice is the radiologist first reads the mammogram to draw his own conclusion, then goes back and checks the computer's findings as a quality assurance.)

Dr. Cooper's ICA is a Hologic R2 representative, selling or leasing the company's CAD systems, which interface with any mammography X-ray unit to digitize images. Hospitals may choose to invest in CR systems, or to outsource the digital conversion or even outsource the full interpretation of the studies. These are all services provided by Dr. Cooper's Imaging Centers of America.

"We focus our attention on smaller hospitals and more often than not in poorer communities because we believe they deserve the same health care, the same benefits that are available in large cities and teaching institutions," Dr. Cooper said of providing CAD to all comers.

More Industry Reports