Pilgrim upgrades NM with remote reporting

With a Symbia S SPECT at the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston are consultant physicist Dr Philip Cosgriff and Siemens applications specialist Anna Wojcieszyn.

The Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, part of United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust, has upgraded its nuclear medicine department with the installation of a Symbia S SPECT from Siemens Healthcare. 

The hospital has also installed Europe’s first Symbia.net Clinical Workflow Server, a client-server solution for the remote processing and reading of nuclear medicine data.

Symbia.net gives staff access to full processing and reading capabilities from two departmental PCs situated on a different floor to the scanning equipment.  A virtually unlimited number of client computers can be installed remotely so that the trust can increase its resourcing as needs evolve.  Manual interaction is reduced as physicians no longer need to wait for a technologist to grant access to view processed files.

The Symbia S at the Pilgrim benefits from a time saving Automatic Quality Control feature and automatic collimator changer.  The changer is integrated with the patient bed and eliminates the need for a separate storage cart, thus saving space and speeding up collimator changing. 

It is estimated that the hospital has freed up around four hours per week of routine scanning time, with QC checks now taking place automatically during the night.  Results are also more reliable and reproducible. 

See the full report on page 2 of the August 2010 issue of RAD Magazine.