Many years ago, Dick Dilick, president and CEO of J&M Trading, Goodlettsville, TN had an idea to extend the life of the X-ray tube by attacking the primary element which fails a tube - that being the arcing and/or corona effects which cause the tube to become useless. "We found that the science behind the failure provided a means to correct the problem, in the field, and we received a series of patents for it," says Dilick. "Basically, tube life is not infinite, but because of its high quality and design characteristics, it is much longer than the life of the combination of the insert and housing in an untouched fashion. Simply removing the water, a polar molecule in a DC Field, and gases, which sometimes produce bubbles in the housing, when created in a situation where the gases are produced in a volume greater than the saturation level of the medium used as either/and an insulation/heat transfer mechanism, allows the dramatic reduction of arcing and corona, and - guess what - a long life (with constant care)." Dilick continues, "Not a very rewarding statement to a patent holder, but very rewarding to the site using the process. In one case, the third party service firm produced an annual profit from one CT scanner alone, over a two year period of $820K," says Dilick.




OEM X-ray tube manufacturer

GE Healthcare, headquartered in the United Kingdom, is an OEM giant in the X-ray tube business. They manufacture X-ray tubes for every medical imaging application including CT, vascular, radiology, R&F and mammography. Global Tubes manager, David Mliner heads up the X-ray tube division at GE Healthcare and says that there are three production centers for X-ray tubes in Europe, India and the United States. "These centers manufacture thousands of tubes per year," says Mliner. He went on to say that an extensive number of quality control tests are performed through the tube manufacturing process to guarantee a high level of performance and a longer lifespan. Global tube engineer manager or GE tube manufacturing, Thomas Ebben, said that the emergence of cardiac applications in diagnostic imaging requires GE to push the limits of performance with x-ray tubes. "To meet this demand, GE Healthcare engineers have created a new generation of X-ray tubes perfectly adapted to the technical requirements of each clinical segment for a better medical diagnosis," Ebben used the Performix Pro Line, as an example. "It is the only X-ray tube in the world that is able to sustain 100KW of power for better image quality during cardiac examinations. In addition, the extremely high heat dissipation rate makes it possible to increase the number of consecutive exams without being limited by tube cooling," states Ebben. GE Healthcare has exclusive rights to their X-ray tubes and only sells directly from GE Healthcare.

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