Replacing older scanners with Canon Medical’s Aquilion ONE / PRISM Edition and Aquilion Prime SP systems has enabled the Radiology team to achieve better imaging, higher diagnostic confidence and a much higher workflow.

“One of our systems was quite an old scanner that was performing badly. Its image quality was not brilliant, and the radiation dose was quite high. Each CT examination required a long acquisition time. And sometimes, we would need to cool down the CT scanner after the examination. All-in-all, it could often take over half an hour or an hour before we were ready to perform the next scan,” explained Dr. Knecht.
“Replacement of this scanner with a new Aquilion Prime SP has changed a lot. Now, we are able to just complete examinations at the patient’s convenience, and we don’t have to wait anymore. So, we can complete many more examinations within a certain time and have a higher throughput and improved workflow.”

The radiology team can also carry out cutting-edge techniques with the new CT systems.

“We can perform more advanced procedures with the Aquilion ONE / PRISM Edition in particular, including cardiac imaging,” said Prof. Dr. med. El-Koussy. “We have also been able to expand our number of interventions, due to new features that we have gained with this scanner. So, we can perform periradicular nerve root blockades, infiltrations, as well as CT fluoroscopy of different locations, especially difficult locations.”

The team have also performed some spectral examinations with the Aquilion ONE / PRISM Edition, starting with kidney stone quantification.

“We may also begin some spectral studies connected with COVID-19, because we performed some studies of our patients that were here in our hospital,” said Prof. Dr. med. El-Koussy.

The systems are unlike any that the team have used previously.

“Our work is much more straightforward, because the performance of the Aquilion CTs is considerably higher,” said Dr. Knecht. “One of the biggest improvements for us was the new detector of the Aquilion ONE. With the 16 cm detector, we are able to acquire volume scans. And we use this quite often, in different situations, such as imaging smaller body parts or joints, brains, or volume scanning during infiltrations or CT fluoroscopy interventions.”

The team have found that operating the Aquilion ONE / PRISM Edition is a much easier process than other CTs. With semi-automated workflow they are able to simply choose the patient region of interest of the study and select a protocol, which sets itself automatically, with all associated parameters set automatically for the desired examination.

“Our radiographers do not have to press a lot of buttons or make a lot of mouse clicks with the Aquilion ONE. It’s all automatic or semi-automatic,” remarked Prof. Dr. med. El-Koussy.
“So, they do not have to change much in the CT. It’s very easy. All Radiographers are able to scan with the new CT system without any problems.”

Dr. Knecht believes there is a kind of renaissance of CT scanners occurring, mainly because of improved dose reduction.

“Now that we can show that we have much lower doses on the CT scanner, the future standpoint of CT is broader than it has been in the last few years,” said Dr. Knecht. “We are very happy that we decided to have two Aquilion CT systems. With these, we have compatible imaging in our department. And CT has quickly become the backbone of our work.” //