In October 1991, I experienced my first in, unfortunately, a string of countless debilitating migraines. My physician sent me to the nearest hospital, Southwest General Health Center (Berea, Ohio), where I had a CT scan. The machine was just a slice-by-slice CT, and the procedure seemed to take forever. Luckily, the scan showed all signs of normalcy in my brain, but times have certainly changed in the past 14 years. Today’s CT scan lasts less than a minute and offers 64 slices of anatomy with incredible resolution that are viewable in 3-D.

As our cover story, “Multi-Slice CT: 64 and Counting,” in this issue details, CT technology has improved dramatically. With these improvements have come a wealth of new applications that are changing the face of today’s imaging arena. Neuroimaging is one such field, as CT has shown incredible promise for diagnosing strokes. According to Sean McSweeney of Toshiba America Medical Systems (Tustin, Calif), physicians have a 6-hour window in which to complete intervention in stroke patients; but today’s CT exams can speed that process. The images can now show smaller structures over a wider area, allowing physicians to scan for aneurysms.

Looking for a chance to learn more about multidetector-row CT? Stanford Radiology is hosting its 7th annual international symposium on the topic this June 15?18 in San Francisco. The event will feature almost 150 lectures in 10-minute increments as well as hands-on workstation training. What I’m most excited about is the workstation face-off?real-time demonstrations of workstation performance by five vendors to compare the capabilities, image qualities, and workflow strategies on the systems, which will be operated by physicians using five clinical datasets. I’ll be attending and will report back the findings; but if you’d like to attend or want more information, visit radiologycme.stanford.edu. Hope to see you there!

Another burgeoning field for CT is trauma, where adult ER patients can have a full-body scan in just 30 seconds. This news is fantastic for automobile accident victims in particular who, unfortunately, have little time to spare. “You can apply CT technology to any organ, determining viability of tissue or ruling out conditions in a matter of seconds,” explains James W. Green of Philips Medical Systems (Bothell, Wash).

CT also is being used to verify history. Siemens Medical Solutions (Malvern, Pa) recently provided a mobile CT system to Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities for a study that performed meticulous CT scans on a variety of Egyptian mummies, including King Tutankhamen. X-ray analysis from 1968 revealing a bone splinter in the skull led many to speculate that King Tut had been murdered. A CT scan in early March, however, provided 1,700 slices?but no evidence of foul play. In fact, the images showed a broken thigh, which researchers believe could have become infected, ultimately causing the Pharaoh’s death. (If you’d like to read more about medical-imaging technology being used for ancient artifacts, see the news item ” Futuristic X-rays open window to the past ;” X-ray images are in use at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and we have the scoop.)

Finally, cardiac imaging seems to have realized the most advancements in CT recently. The LightSpeed VCT 64-slice scanner from GE Healthcare (Waukesha, Wis), for example, can capture the heart and coronary arteries in less than 5 seconds. In other words, one scan allows physicians to rule out the three most life-threatening causes of chest pain: heart attacks, pulmonary embolisms, and aortic dissections or tears. “The VCT can get this scan with one breath hold and one contrast injection,” says Scott Schubert of GE Healthcare. “It’s more cost-effective and time-efficient than using three or four different studies to reach the same diagnosis.”

With technology advancing in the quick fashion that it has, imaging is starting to fall into fields other than radiology-specifically, cardiology. It will be intriguing to see the turf wars between these two fields grow more intensely in the coming months and years. Stay tuned as Medical Imaging covers this issue in the future.


Andi Lucas
Editor