Toshiba ships 100th Vantage

Toshiba America Medical Systems (TAMS) has shipped its 100th Excelart Vantage, a high field 1.5T MRI system.

The Vantage system features many proprietary design features and technologies to facilitate patient-focused medical examinations, including Pianissimo technology to reduce scan noise by as much as 90 percent and SPEEDER parallel processing to support high-speed, high-quality imaging, TAMS said.

The Vantage features an ultra-short magnet at 140 cm with linear 30 mT/m (milliTesla per meter) gradient strength and a slew rate of 50 T/m/s (Tesla per meter per second) or 130 T/m/s.  MRI applications available include cardiac imaging, advanced echo planar imaging (EPI), perfusion and diffusion imaging, peripheral MR angiography (MRA), and SuperFASE (Fast Advanced Spin Echo) imaging.

Around the web

The nuclear imaging isotope shortage of molybdenum-99 may be over now that the sidelined reactor is restarting. ASNC's president says PET and new SPECT technologies helped cardiac imaging labs better weather the storm.

CMS has more than doubled the CCTA payment rate from $175 to $357.13. The move, expected to have a significant impact on the utilization of cardiac CT, received immediate praise from imaging specialists.

The newly cleared offering, AutoChamber, was designed with opportunistic screening in mind. It can evaluate many different kinds of CT images, including those originally gathered to screen patients for lung cancer. 

Trimed Popup
Trimed Popup