by
Keith Loria, Reporter | February 19, 2011
From the January/February 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Carestream Health's
DRX mobile retrofit
Wireless is important for radiography departments, as it speeds the work process allowing for more imaging and it also pulls the plug on a former hazard. “The simple innovation of getting rid of the cable is huge. Eliminating the tether was so big because it’s almost impossible to keep it clean in an operating room environment,” Philips’ Lobree says. “Patient positioning freedom is another huge benefit because you don’t need to struggle with getting the cable around or under the table.”
Lobree expects to see a big shift with people buying wireless detectors with their DR rooms and their portables.
Fujifilm will release its new wireless DR, the FDR D-EVO, sometime in the first few months of this year. “Wireless systems are important in DR as it puts the electronics closer to the focus of the captured X-ray photons that are absorbed by the layers inside, so it creates stronger, sharper images,” Fabrizio says. “With our design, we are able to achieve a dose reduction from our original CR of as much as 30 percent.”
DR durability
When DR was first introduced, some in the industry were slow to adopt the technology due to questions about its durability. While still not as durable as CR, major strides have been made to address the market’s concerns.
“It was an issue in the past but durability is getting better and better,” Lobree says. “Rarely do you see detector failures anymore. Software has gotten much more stable, the image processing has gotten easier to use and converting from CR to DR has gotten a lot easier and a lot more reliable.”
Still, CR can stand a lot more of a beating from the normal use of a portable system and even if one were to drop and break the cassette, it’s not as expensive to replace.
“From our perspective, the biggest concern we’ve heard from customers is about the DR plate fragility and cost to replace,” says Nicholas Hersman, associate product manager of Medrad Inc. “Service level agreements on DR systems will cover the DR plate, but will not cover misuse and abuse. Our customers have indicated that the primary means of failure on the plates is due to dropping them, thereby making the contract null and void.”
