SAN FRANCISCO - Siemens Medical Solutions of Malvern, PA, has announced a new version of its 64-slice CT platform that's optimized for cardiac, thoracic, and vascular studies. The company debuted the system at this week's International Symposium on Multidetector-Row CT.
Somatom Sensation Cardiac 64 features a standard gantry rotation speed of 0.33 seconds, compared with the 0.37-sec rotation speed found on the previous 64-slice Siemens model. This gives the scanner a temporal resolution up to 83 milliseconds (ms), which enables the scanning of patients with higher heart rates than possible on older scanners, according to the company.
The 0.33-sec rotation speed and 64-slice acquisition enables ECG-gated coverage of the entire chest in a 20-second breath-hold, according to Richard Hausmann, president of the company's CT division. Siemens claims that the system is capable of "virtually motion-free" evaluation of peripheral segments of the coronary arteries, including plaque evaluation and improved follow-up assessment of stent patency.
The scanner uses the same z-Sharp technology found on the previous 64-slice Somatom. The z-Sharp design toggles the x-ray beam in the scanner's Straton tube to double the number of slices acquired per gantry rotation, without increasing x-ray dose, according to the company. Siemens introduced z-Sharp on the Sensation 64 scanner at last year's Radiological Society of North America meeting.
Sensation Cardiac 64 is undergoing testing at luminary sites in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and the 0.33-sec rotation speed will be available on 64-slice scanners in the fall of 2004.
By AuntmMinnie.com staff writers
June 25, 2004
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