Innovative features
Canon Medical's
SURESubtraction application, an acquisition mode similar to a DSA sequence in angiography, brings significant advantages in daily routine, according to Prof. Frandon.
‘First, we make a mask acquisition with a very low dose, then an arterial acquisition that allows us to obtain a perfect vascular and bone CT subtraction volume automatically.’
This ability is particularly beneficial in the prostate, where traditional segmentation can be very time consuming. ‘It used to take us a lot of time, because some vessels near the sacrum were deleted on the consoles and we had to perform manual segmentation,’ he said.
‘Today, we use SURESubtraction all the time, and also in the liver. For example, we can now see if there’s new contrast enhancement of a previously treated nodule or if it’s Lipiodol from an old procedure.
’The Auto-registration module was recently installed, allowing for automatic fusion of CT volumes with fluoroscopy without the need to perform frontal and lateral fluoroscopy to align the CT volume with the actual fluoroscopy image. ‘It works very well and it’s allowed us to optimize our workflow,’ he said.
The newly designed hybrid CT touch-panel interface for CT guided interventions that enables one-handed operation was recently installed, at the team's request.
‘We're really satisfied with this upgrade. Canon Medical designed the Hybrid Touch Panel so that a single operator could perform most tasks at the bedside and fewer interactions are required from the radiographers. These are real advantages for workflow during our interventions and the optimization of our staff management.’ The Alphenix 4D CT is also equipped with Advanced intelligent Clear-IQ Engine (AiCE), a CT reconstruction algorithm based on artificial intelligence that enables to further reduce radiation dose.
‘When we do interventional procedures, we can accept a noisy image because the goal is simply to be able to guide ourselves, even at low dose,’ Prof. Frandon said. ‘Nevertheless, some operators asked for an increase in dose in order to reduce the noise. We no longer have this problem with AiCE. The image noise is removed while the texture is maintained and without distortion, allowing us to work in Ultra Low Dose.’
Patients, too, are very happy with the Alphenix 4D CT. ‘They know that the procedure will be much more precise. The fact that we have the multimodality interventional system with the wide-area CT scanner is clearly a benefit,’ he concluded.
You can also read this piece as the original published article in VISIONS 40#. Click to download it
here.
Read the full edition of the VISIONS #40 Magazine →