Watauga Medical adds

latest in CT scanners
By Scott Nicholson
nicholson@wataugademocrat.com

Now local patients can let doctors get under their skin with barely a scratch.

Watauga Medical Center recently installed an advanced computer tomography (CT) scanning machine that allows diagnosing physicians to zoom down to the vascular level and see what’s happening in patients’ hearts and other organs. The VCTXT model from General Electric has a 64-slice imaging system that can take a series of snap shots of the trouble area and quickly build a comprehensive image.

Brandie Foster, director of the hospital’s imaging department, said, “The 64-slice scanner gives us the ability to image vessels in the body much faster than the other machines. You don’t get the ‘motion artifact,’ or blur, and you get a better image and you get it faster.”

Foster said the scanner is also advantageous when time is critical, such as when a trauma patient has multiple wounds. A complete scan for an average-size person can be completed in 12 seconds, allowing doctors to make potentially life-saving decisions on the spot.

It has also enhanced diagnostic power for a host of processes and shows great promise for helping treat cardiac disorders. “It can get down to functional activities,” Foster said. “Cardiac wall activity, fusion in the brain, calcium in blood vessels, bronchi in the lungs, a virtual colonoscopy.”

The new CT machine gathers a volume of information five times greater than the previous CT machine, which will still be used for some diagnoses. Staff members are already using the new machine, though training is much more complex for radiologists. Foster expects the scanner to be used for cardiac conditions beginning in March.

The advanced CT machine is the only one in the High Country, and Foster said knowledgeable patients and their doctors had been asking about such a machine. Even at a price tag of $1.4 million, the CT machine is already making a critical difference in how doctors get an inner view of their patients.

Dr. Rick Cornella, medical director of the radiology department, said, “It obtains information much more quickly, with a major advance in viewing vascular structures, including coronary arteries. The speed of the scanner allows more accurate imaging and diagnosis.”

Cornella said another advantage is that imaging sometimes turns up other potential health problems and the ordering physician can often use the images to augment or replace other types of tests. The images can also be manipulated to get three-dimensional views of the target area.

The scanner averages two patients an hour, and costs of imaging generally range around $1,000 and up.

The machine is capable of undergoing software upgrades and features software that limits the patient’s amount of radiation exposure. Future expansions including digital mammography and functional analysis of organ transplants are on the horizon.

The most immediate benefit is local patients don’t have to make a trip off the mountain to seek the advanced scans, and as patients learn more about technological advances in medicine, they will ask for CT scans, particularly with heart disease being one of the top killers in the country.

“We can image the entire cardiac structure in five heartbeats,” Foster said. “This really shines when you get down to fine vessels.”