Lower dose CT for Macclesfield DGH

From left are consultant radiologist Dr Mike Crotch-Harvey, PACS Manager John Dillion, consultant radiologist Dr Christopher Loughran, assistant practitioners Nicola Fox and Linda Connolly, radiology manager Sara Dogra (seated), clinical lead radiology Dr Naveen Vasireddy, senior radiographer Elizabeth Camerron (seated), GE Healthcare CT modality manager Simon Hall and account manager Dawn Philips.

East Cheshire NHS Trust has installed a VCT 64-slice with ASIR (Adaptive Statistical Iterative Reconstruction) to enable improved patient diagnosis at lower x-ray dose.

With the new VCT ASIR Advanced CT scanner from GE Healthcare, Macclesfield District General Hospital will, for the first time, see images with less than 1mm thickness to visualise anatomy not seen before.

Usually, such image clarity comes with the penalty of more radiation dose for the patient.  Macclesfield however now benefits from ASIR, which allows patients to be scanned with up to half the radiation dose of current scanners and no adverse impact on image clarity.

The scanner is also capable of scanning up to 10 times quicker than previous generation scanners.

See this report on page 12 of the January 2011 issue of RAD Magazine.