Crouse Hospital gets new imaging technology

CNY Business Journal (1996+), Feb 17, 2006 by Tampone, Kevin

SYRACUSE - Crouse Hospital's imaging department has a new scanner that combines the best capabilities of two older technologies.

The scanner, manufactured by Siemens, is one of the first of its kind in the country. The only other one in the eastern United States is in Michigan, says Brad Hellwig, director of medical imaging for Crouse.

It has been up and running at the hospital since mid-January. The scanner costs about $750,000, although Crouse did not pay that much. Hellwig declined to say how much Crouse paid.

The equipment combines a camera used in nuclear medicine with a computerizedtomography (CT) scanner. Combining the two imaging technologies gives doctors a superior end image. The two methods cover each other's shortfalls, says Thomas Green, chief of radiology at the hospital.

In nuclear medicine, a patient ingests or is injected with a substance that is then read by a camera through the body. The technique allows doctors to observe the functionality of an area in the body, Green says.

For example, nuclear medicine can help physicians observe blood flow in the heart or brain to check for problems that could lead to heart attacks or Alzheimer's disease.

The technique, however, provides no information about anatomy. It can sometimes be difficult to pinpoint the exact location of a problem identified through the procedure.

That's where CT scanning comes in, Green says. That process provides doctors with detailed information on anatomy, he explains.

Software that attempts to mesh scan results from separate machines has existed for a number of years, but it never worked very well, Green says. That's because it is difficult, if not impossible, for a patient to be in the exact same position for two scans on separate machines.

"The alignment was never quite right," he says.

Crouse's new scanner takes the images of both scanning technologies simultaneously, meaning the resulting images can be seamlessly imposed over each other on a computer screen. That allows doctors to see a problem with an organ or bone using nuclear-medicine information and then precisely identify its location with the information from the CT scan.

"It makes the study more exact," Green says. "I can tell, a lot of the time, in my head, just from reading thousands of scans, the location of a lot of the problems I see. But this makes it much easier. And in difficult cases, it's extremely helpful.

"It's just the evolution of medicine. Technology continues to get better and better."

While the software capabilities to run a piece of equipment like the new scanner have existed for a while, it can take time for hardware to catch up, Green explains.

Both components of the scanner can also be used separately, he adds.

The software that runs the machine and processes the images has an array of helpful tools as well, Hellwig says.

It contains, for example, a database of information on brain blood flow culled from patients throughout the country When looking at a scan of any individual, doctors can use that information to identify specific areas of the brain that show deviations from the norm.

The software can also create graphic representations of a patient's heart that show it in motion and reveal how blood flow changes as the muscle works harder. The software, along with the combined technologies, help correct for false readings that can be generated by fat in a patient's body.

Previously those types of corrections could take all day, if they were possible at all, Hellwig says.

The scanner has been popular with doctors so far and has already proven its worth, Hellwig says. For example, a patient was in the hospital with a high fever. Doctors tagged the person's white blood cells with a dye that would show up on the nuclear-medicine scan.

The cells went straight to the site of the infection, but that alone was not enough to diagnose the problem. Using CT information, doctors were able to pinpoint the location of the increased white-blood-cell activity. They determined the patient had a colon infection, a diagnosis that would have been very difficult to make using just nuclear medicine or CT scanning alone.

"It's amazing what it can do," Hellwig says. "We're lucky to have it."