SAN FRANCISCO - Toshiba America Medical Systems of Tustin, CA, announced the development of a new 64-slice CT scanner at this week's International Symposium on Multidetector-Row CT.
Aquilion 64 represents the extension of the company's Aquilion product platform into the 64-slice segment, according to the company. The system's technical capabilities were discussed at the San Francisco meeting by Dr. Kazuhiro Katada of Fujita Health University in Japan, where a 64-slice unit has been operating since late March. Katada compared images from the 64-slice unit to a 32-slice scanner, and discussed the new clinical capabilities possible with the system.
Toshiba said that Aquilion 64 uses the same platform as Aquilion 32, the company's 32-slice system that was launched at the 2003 Radiological Society of North America meeting. Aquilion 64 features a new 64-row Quantum detector that acquires 64 0.5-mm slices of data simultaneously with each 400-ms gantry rotation, producing z-axis coverage of 48 mm per rotation. Toshiba is also touting the detector's low-contrast resolution of 2 mm and isotropic slice resolution of 0.35 mm.
In addition to the Fujita system, a scanner with 64-slice detectors has been installed at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore since February. The scanner has FDA clearance, and shipments will begin in 2005, according to Toshiba. Aquilion 32 units in the field can be upgraded to 64-slice models.
In other Toshiba CT news, the company has signed a preferred-provider agreement to supply its multislice CT technology to Lake Erie Regional Cooperative, a Toledo, OH-based cost-containment and standardization organization comprised of 25 hospitals and healthcare organizations in northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan.
The cooperative has already acquired two Aquilion CT systems from Toshiba, according to the company.
By AuntMinnie.com staff writers
June 24, 2004
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