By Aine Cryts
When patients are in the intensive care unit (ICU) after a stroke or a traumatic brain injury—say, due to a car accident—they need to be scanned on a daily basis to assess changes related to brain swelling or the growth of a brain bleed.
Many of these patients are connected to ventilators, which means they need access to a portable vent or a hospital staff member who can manually provide them with air during their transport to the radiology department to get those scans. Dena Cunningham, director of business management for mobile CT at Malvern, Penn.-based Siemens Healthineers, tells AXIS Imaging News that this workflow can introduce risk to patients.
In addition, this challenging workflow means ICU nurses and CT technologists are engaged in “hurry-up-and-wait,” since it can require up to five people to transport a patient to the radiology department; and technologists must focus on ICU patients first, which translates to delays for other patients, she says. In addition, the ICU nurse who’s waiting with the patient in the radiology department is often responsible for one or two other patients—and that means nurses back in the ICU are covering additional patients.
To address these issues, Siemens Healthineers introduced Somatom On.site, a mobile head CT scanner, at the Radiological Society of North America’s (RSNA’s) annual meeting, which took place in Chicago from December 1 to December 6.
What radiologists care about is having access to high-quality images because they need to provide a reliable diagnosis. That means they don’t care if the high-quality images were captured on a mobile or stationary CT scanner, according to Cunningham, who served as a technologist for five years.
In addition to ICU staff, there’s a constellation of care providers monitoring the patient in the ICU. That can include their primary-care provider or an internist monitoring their overall care, in addition to a neurologist or a neurosurgeon. Those physicians want to access their patients’ scans first thing in the morning—before rounds. This enables the clinical team to develop an overall plan for each patient, she explains.
While CT technologists generally like mobile CTs, Cunningham admits these scanners have gotten “a bad rap” in the past. For one thing, transporting an older mobile CT scanner typically required two technologists because the system included separate computer towers and a separate gantry. Another challenge was that image quality often wasn’t good, which meant patients had to be rescanned, she adds.
By way of contrast, one technologist can drive the Somatom On.site, which weighs 1,900 pounds, and operate it in the ICU, Cunningham tells AXIS. The technologist may need help from an ICU staff member to position the patient, who is moved up on their bed and into the mobile CT scanner’s head holder before images are captured.
Currently, an 510(k) application for Somatom On.site is pending with the FDA, a Siemens Healthineers spokesperson tells AXIS. While the federal agency can clear a product within 90 days, the company is unable to project when its mobile head CT scanner will be generally available.
Aine Cryts is a contributing writer for AXIS Imaging News.
