04.08.05 | The world’s fastest computer tomograph — the Siemens Somatom Sensation 64 — provides entirely new insights into the human heart. Frost & Sullivan has now awarded the system its award “2005 Enabling Technology of the Year”. With a rotational speed of 0.33 seconds, the CT makes possible images of the highest quality and with a spatial resolution of less than 0.4 millimeters — even of moving organs.

This results in a number of advantages when examining patients suffering from coronary artery disease: Until now, in order to detect deposits in the arteries that narrow these vessels and can ultimately cause heart attacks, it was necessary to insert a cardiac catheter, a relatively complicated and time-consuming procedure. Thanks to the CT coronary angiography, the time required for an examination, including diagnosis, has been reduced from 45 minutes to about ten minutes, with eight seconds of scanning time. And patients are spared an unpleasant invasive procedure.

The examination is greatly simplified — and diagnoses more accurate — while costs are simultaneously reduced. Let's take emergency medical treatment as an example. Using conventional methods, a patient with acute chest pain must undergo a lengthy and costly series of tests: First a computer tomograph scan of the lungs is performed, to rule out an embolism. Then, also using CT, the aorta is checked for disorders. Finally, if this is not the case, the coronary arteries are examined with a catheter. With the Somatom Sensation 64, the entire thorax can now be scanned within 15 seconds with only one computer tomography procedure, making all potentially affected organs visible at the same time.

With a 70 percent market share and more than 330 devices installed, the innovative technology is benefiting leading international experts and institutes, including William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, the Toyohashi Heart Center in Japan, the German Heart Center in Munich and the Centre Chirurgical Marie Lannelongue in Paris.

And the high-resolution images also improve diagnostics in other clinical areas of application. The rate of a tumor’s growth can be much more precisely monitored, for example, and the brain structures of stroke patients can be displayed with far greater accuracy. And coloscopies — a routine procedure that patients dislike — is even possible with CT, as a kind of virtual flight through the large intestine.
(IN 2005.08.1)