Kenneth Saltrick, President of Engineering Services, Twinsburg, OH sees the used equipment and parts market required to refurbish portable X-ray machines definitely on the rise and sees quality versus cost as the biggest challenge. Saltrick limits his services to the repair of Interconnect cables for the 9400/9600/9800/9900 C-arms for GE. "The machines are selling strong and due to the workmanship, none have come back to us once we work on the cables," says Saltrick. "Most of our sales are to distributors, or third party parts supply networks. We have a hospital following that we deal with directly."





President of JCF Engineering, Inc., Stephanie Espinola agrees and says that the service costs of maintaining portables are a challenge because "they are subject to extensive abuse by technicians and smaller problems are not always reported." She finds her company is constantly replacing cable and hand switches, addressing mechanical failures and attempting to undo harm done by technicians/supervisors attempting to repair equipment themselves using the wrong hardware and repair techniques. JFC has even designed a Van Lift that they sell to local mobile imaging companies in order to try to prevent damage to portable X-ray machines in transit. It is mounted on six shipboard machinery mounts to prevent damage to the electronics. The ram slides out to unload, flips up and the X-ray machine is winched down to the ground. "The most common damage to an X-ray machine is caused by winching the machine up too far, breaking off the yellow 'stops,'" says Espinola. "Amazingly, we have problems with technicians breaking this piece of equipment as well."

For those who have not converted because of the economy, regular preventive maintenance is all the more important. When a machine is wheeled to a neonatal intensive care unit or to the Emergency Room it has to work. By nature alone, portable X-rays are tough and withstand the rigors of usage in the day-to-day health care facility worlds. "Portable units like the AMX-4 are workhorse systems that can last for a long time if maintained correctly," says Carlos Cooper, Regional Manager for Managed Medical Imaging. He says that the most common cause of downtime with an AMX-4 is related to the charging system. "When technicians do not correctly charge a unit, they are slowly causing damage to the parts related to the charging system," says Cooper. Battery life shortens and charging circuits go bad. When the system is not properly charged, calibration settings can become inaccurate in the RAM memory causing inaccurate output of Kvp/Ma (Mas) settings, which results in poor image quality. Regular preventive maintenance can ensure that these problems are addressed before they grow.

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