The Aquillion ONE costs as much as a slice of Hawaiian beachfront property and generates more g-force than an astronaut feels on liftoff, but also houses tech that can rapidly save lives.
Courtesy Toshiba Toshiba is rolling out a new CT scanner that creates detailed 3-D movies of entire organs in real time. The new scanner -- the Aquilion ONE -- promises fast and accurate diagnoses in emergencies like strokes and heart attacks, offering patients the best treatment options.
"It's a great example of how a simple technique can eliminate risks and costs," says Kieran Murphy, a doctor who consulted on the Aquilion ONE's development.
Ten years and $500 million in the making, the Aquilion ONE has been installed in only five hospitals globally. But in 2008, 200 of the units will ship to medical centers worldwide.
The scanner is a beast. Current CT scanners have 64 channels, each capturing a single cross-section slice of the body. The Aquilion ONE has 320 channels, streaming 10 GB of information per second. Its gantry -- the 2-meter–tall cylinder housing the imaging sensors -- spins so fast it generates 27 Gs, and takes just .35 seconds per rotation.
Rendered in less than a minute by the Aquilion ONE, the red and green areas on the left side of the image show increased blood flow in and around a hyperaggressive brain tumor.
Courtesy Toshiba
The Aquilion ONE can scan an entire organ in one swoop of the gantry. Doctors can see the heart pumping, or blood working through the brain after a heartbeat.
The scanner's speed will significantly boost diagnosis time and treatment options. Currently, doctors may perform a battery of tests to confirm a heart attack -- an EKG, a calcium study, CT angiography, nuclear testing and catheterization.
Tests can take from hours to days. Confirming a stroke requires similar evaluations, but the stakes are even higher: Not only is the window for treatment just a few hours long, the clot-busting drugs that could be used can also cause massive hemorrhaging if there's a misdiagnosis.
But in 20 minutes, the Aquilion ONE is able to not only accurately diagnose a stroke or heart attack, but also gauge just how badly the tissue has been damaged.
A conventional CT scanner has a viewing window of just a couple of centimeters. To view a fist-sized organ like the heart, the machine's sensors must take a series of images that are then built into a single, often-distorted image. (Think of trying to snap a panorama of the Grand Canyon on your camera phone, then stitching the pictures together.) Dynamic images -- like one of a heart completing a single beat -- aren't possible, because it takes 12 to 15 seconds to complete a whole-organ scan.
The Aquilion ONE may also be used in a preventative role.
"We can see areas of (the) brain that aren't getting enough blood and oxygen and are at risk for stroke," says William Orrison, the chief of neuroimaging at Nevada Imaging Center, which just purchased an Aquilion ONE. "Since we can see what we couldn't see before, we can think of new treatments to prevent a stroke from happening."
Future applications of the scanner might reach even further: The Aquilion ONE will soon be used to determine the efficacy of cancer treatments.
Today, anti-angiogenesis drugs, which halt the blood flow to a tumor, are the most advanced weapons in the cancer-fighting arsenal. But no one drug is universal -- because human anatomy is so nuanced, responses vary from patient to patient.
The Aqullion ONE can scan and render a real-time image of your heart in the time it takes the organ to beat once.
Courtesy Toshiba
Current CT scanners can provide some insight into whether a drug is working to shrink a tumor's blood supply, but their limited views create uncertainty. The Aquilion ONE can show how a widely spread cancer -- in the liver or pancreas, for example -- is responding to a drug. From there, doctors will be able to create tailored treatments based on patient response.
The machine is expensive -- about $2.5 million, versus $1.5 million for a typical CT scanner. But hospitals should be able to pay back the difference in as little as two years, because they might save as much as $3,000 diagnosing a heart attack or stroke.
For hospitals, taking less time saves money. For patients, time is life.
"It eliminates the need for half my practice," confesses Murphy, who trained for 10 years in intravenous radiology. "It's wonderful."
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