From the October 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Hitachi
At last year’s RSNA, Hitachi released a compact, economical CT scanner for the value-oriented market of community hospitals called the Supria True64.

The scanner is an upgrade from the Supria 16-slice model and it’s called the True64 because “it is a CT that really has 64 discrete detector channels,” said Mark Silverman, manager of CT marketing for Hitachi. “Being a true 64 gives it some speed of scanning and resolution advantages.”
For the premium market, many manufacturers design a true 64-slice scanner, but for the economy market, they create a 32-slice CT that uses software upgrades to get the 64 slices, Silverman said.

“The 16-slice market is beginning to fade away,” Silverman said. “The true 64 is becoming the new 16.”

Supria True64 also comes with a new environmental efficiency feature called Eco-Mode that reduces power consumption by up to 55 percent when the scanner is idle.

MedicVision
Back in early 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced reimbursement for low-dose CT lung cancer screenings for certain Medicare beneficiaries.

The screening presents a new potential source of income for imaging centers, but the scans cannot exceed radiation levels of 1.5 mSv in order to be eligible for reimbursement, which can be hard to achieve with older or lower-level CT scanners, said Eyal Aharon, the chief executive officer of MedicVision.

“In many places where they use older machines, they cannot get reimbursement,” Aharon said.

Last year, the company released SafeCT LS, a cloud-based solution – there is no hardware or on-site software installation – that reprocesses the low-dose scans to help facilities get under the 1.5 mSv threshold while retaining image quality. A Cloud-based solution eliminates the investment in equipment and facilities pay for SafeCT LS per scan.

While lung cancer screening programs have been slow to adoption, Aharon said the company has noticed an increase in the market in the last year or so, and thus the need for such a solution.

Neusoft
Around last year’s RSNA, Neusoft received FDA clearance for its NeuViz Prime 128-slice dual energy CT scanner with spectral imaging capabilities.

What makes the system unique is a newly designed X-ray tube that removes heat faster than it's introduced, said Keith Mildenberger, the CT product manager for Neusoft.

October 2018 Magazine

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