New device will give doctors better views inside body
McCall Memorial Hospital has purchased a $1.6 million multi-slice CT scanner with advanced technology previously available only at big city medical centers.
The radiology department's single slice six-year-old CT - computed tomography - scanner will give way to one that can create three-dimensional images that model organs and tissues.
The new technology makes for a more powerful diagnostic tool, McCall Memorial radiologist Dr. Steven Merandi said.
The new scanner and a new computer system plus software will be the largest capital expenditure in the hospital's history, Development Director Alex Hamilton said.
The new scanner should be in service the first week of April. The hospital is also phasing in a new computer system, called PACS, or picture archiving and communication system along with the new equipment.
With PACS, everything from X-rays to ultrasounds will become part of a digital data base readily available to outlying clinics over the Internet.
Doctors in towns like Cascade, Riggins and Council will be able to tap into the McCall data base to look at a patient's X-rays, ultrasounds, and MRI and CT scans.
The system will be secure so only physicians can have access to medical data and backup will ensure doctors can still get their hands on the information in case of a computer crash.
“Overall efficiency is greatly increased for the doctors because they don’t now have to go to the X-rays; the X-rays can come to them," Merandi said.
The acquisition is being made under a lease-purchase to be paid back with hospital operating revenues.
Donations toward the purchase have included $139,287 from the McCall Memorial Hospital Foundation and $29,200 from the McCall Memorial Hospital Auxiliary.
From the outside, the new machine won't look much different from the one now in use, but the big difference is on the inside.
"Although it looks fairly similar to the CT that's in there right now, both its hardware and software capabilities have made quantum leaps beyond the current state of CT technology that we now have," Merandi said.
The current scanner makes an image of the body one "slice" at a time. A slice is a picture of a thin section of the body. The new scanner makes 32 slices at a time, he said.
The data can be rendered into sharp three-dimensional pictures of body tissues from the skin to the bones, including muscles and blood vessels.
On a computer monitor, doctors can flip and turn the pictures and make specific tissues transparent or remove them altogether to get a better look at an area of concern.
The 3-D view is the next best thing to physically looking inside the body and promises to cut down on invasive diagnostic procedures, as well as giving doctors greater confidence in diagnosis, Merandi said.
"We'll be looking at in the future a volume of data for a particular body part be it head, chest, abdomen or extremities, "Merandi said, "We can manipulate that volume data in many different ways ... to look at something and therefore increase our diagnostic abilities and accuracy."
The current machine is limited in what it can do, and patients have been sent to Boise if getting a good image is difficult.
The current scanner also will not produce a good picture of tissue with metal implants such as those used for hip replacement, back fusion or broken bones.
With the new scanner, doctors will be able to look at the heart and arteries throughout the body for signs of hardening or trauma.
They will be able to "dissect" an area of concern, highlight an organ or a section of blood vessel, and will also be able to look for broken metal pins and implants.
"This is technology that smaller areas would never have or would want to have because the volume of their population doesn't demand it," Merandi said.
A demonstration of the new CT imagery is available at the McCall Memorial Hospital's Website, "Multislice CT."
