Critical Care Radiography System

A new digital radiography system can perform a full body scan in 13 seconds, enabling emergency personnel to rapidly diagnose and treat critically injured patients in record time and with considerably less radiation than conventional radiography systems.

Recently installed at the Trauma Center at The University Hospital (Newark, NJ, USA), the Statscan critical imaging system, developed by Lodox Systems (Benmore, South Africa), was designed for rapid medical diagnoses in hospital trauma units and emergency departments. Recently shown to be clinically superior to conventional computer radiography (CR) by a study at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center (Baltimore, USA), Statscan is a flexible-format digital radiography system used for quick medical diagnoses in hospital trauma units and emergency departments. Its low-dose digital x-ray technology is capable of quickly providing high-resolution full-body imaging.

Of 178 patients tested, the findings demonstrated that patients x-rayed using this system received 93% less radiation than the patients scanned using CR. It also took Stascan 60% less time to complete an x-ray study compared to those being imaged using a CR system. Statscan also had a 12% higher rate of accuracy in diagnosing spinal cord injuries over CR. The study concluded that this system provides a much faster method for radiographic screening of acute injury, comparable in diagnostic quality to CR, and requiring far less time and a huge reduction in radiation exposure.

The system enables hospitals considerable disaster planning benefits because of its very high patient throughput. Statscan's full-body scanning times are comparable to the time it takes traditional x-ray systems to produce a single extremity image. Unlike regular film or other forms of digital x-ray methods that usually take as long as 45 minutes to complete, a full body Statscan procedure can be completed and displayed at a viewing station in typically less than three minutes. The digital technology allows clinicians to magnify or rotate images without affecting image clarity.

Using traditional x-ray systems, x-rays are first taken of the area of the body that may be most obviously injured, and it may take several minutes to determine where and what type of critical injury may have occurred. Moreover, in about 20-25% of the time, injuries are missed completely using conventional injury assessment modalities, or possibly located after the fact when it is too late. This imaging system can eliminate this potential difficulty.



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