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Biotech / Medical : IMAT - ultrafast tomography for coronary artery disease -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Angel Medina who wrote (2782)	12/17/1998 11:10:00 AM
From: Bruce Rozenblit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3725

Thanks, its nice to be appreciated. I posted something similar to the following on Yahoo and got no response. People usually ignore good ideas because they don't understand them. No vision. Here goes. I think Imatron has gone down the wrong path. What they have done is taken a wonderful new technology and incorporated into the format of a conventional full body imaging CT machine. The primary usage is application specific, finding calcium burden in cardiac arteries. If that is what it is used for, then why not develop a machine that does that and no more. I'm speaking as an experienced design engineer. What I envision is a machine that has a vertical horseshoe shaped assembly that a patient stands inside on a platform. The platform would raise or lower the patient a length of approx. 12 inches to just target the heart. By restricting the area of the body to be scanned, it should possible to greatly reduce the number of sensors greatly lowering cost. Also by reducing the scan area, the projector assembly could be simplified, its control hardware reduced, beam power (maybe) be reduced, all of which would greatly reduce cost. The mechanical structure and assembly would be made much smaller by virtue of the reduced assemblies and scan area, eliminating the need for a lot of heavy iron. This is a really big cost saving. If the primary piece of information is a "calcuim score", then that's what we give them. The information could be acquired in two dimensional format, further reducing the need for extra sensors and beam manipulation hardware. I have not research EBCT technology to verify if any of these ideas would be impossible to implement but any problems should be solvable. That's what good engineers do. The reason there are no conventional CT machines configured as such is because there has never been a need for one before. I would not be surprised, if my concepts are correct, that a scanner could be built and sold for half the money of the current model. If I had the $20 million that they through out on HeartScan over the last 3 years and access to the technology, I could build such a machine. It would probably take 2 years and a lot of hard work, but it could be done. Any reactions from the medical people?