Elscint takes aim at cardiac CT

Until this year, the use of CT imaging to assess coronary artery calcification screening has almost exclusively been the purview of ultrafast CT developer Imatron. Israeli medical imaging vendor Elscint (Hall A, #3615) believes that its CT technology is also capable of performing the scans, however, and the company will display a CT-scoring algorithm for its premium CT-Twin scanner.

Proponents of CT coronary artery screening say that the technique can be useful as a noninvasive test for determining the risk of coronary artery disease in asymptomatic patients. Due to scanning speeds that are much faster than conventional CT systems, Imatron's electron-beam CT scanner has kept the application to itself for the past several years.

Elscint believes that its dual-slice CT technology will enable CT-Twin to conduct the exams as well, because the scanner collects twice as much data in the same amount of time as a single-slice system, according to Shabtai Samoilov, CT product manager. Clinicians conducting the exams collect 3-mm slices of the entire volume of the heart, with a total acquisition time of 20 seconds. The procedure does not require contrast media.

During postprocessing of the images, clinicians can review the study on a slice-by-slice basis, identify calcified lesions, and assign them to the correct coronary artery. The software's scoring algorithm then gives a score for each coronary artery, based on the level of calcification, as well as a total score for the exam.

Elscint received FDA clearance for the technique in May and began sales in September. It is offered as an option for CT-Twin scanners at a list price of $50,000.

In the connectivity realm, Elscint will debut Interview, its name for the MediSurf Web-based image distribution product developed by Algotec Systems of Raanana, Israel

Elscint's MRI group will feature enhancements to its 2-tesla Prestige system, and will show images of MR microscopy captured with its 1-tesla Prima 1TG scanner.