Following a nod from the FDA, users can soon expect to integrate patient-centric mobile workflows into practices beyond routine procedure with the use of Siemens Healthineers’ SOMATOM go.All and SOMATOM go.Top CT scanners.

The clearance of the two allows for better performance in advanced clinical fields and applications such as cardiology, CT-guided intervention and dual-energy CT, strengthening the tablet and remote control-based workflow.

“With the cardiac CT study, you're trying to take an image of the heart, and you're trying to take an image of extremely small vessels, three main coronary arteries that are moving very quickly and pumping blood,” Mark Palacio, CT product manager at Siemens Healthineers North America, told HCB News. “You need a CT with a very fast ability that we call temporal resolution, the ability to image fast-moving anatomy very quickly. It gives you a nice image of that particular moment in time of that anatomy that will not have motion artifacts. In other words, it will not have poor image quality due to the fact that your scanner wasn't fast enough to scan it.”
The scanners are equipped with an Athlon X-ray tube that offers high mA at low kV for personalized dose optimization. Tube voltage can be adjusted in 10 kV increments which keeps current high while CARE kV technology removes guesswork in dose parameter adjustments.

Users also have more flexibility in contrast injector arrangement with the gantry-mounted injector arm, and can address a variety of clinical needs with the addition of Stellar detector technology, a 75 kW generator and a rotation time of 0.33-second rotation.

The 128-slice SOMATOM go.Top individually is ideal for trauma settings, utilizing a large detector to deliver acquisition speeds of up to 175 mm per second and offers TwinBeam Dual-Energy imaging for simultaneous examination of the same region at two different energy levels.

This ability makes it an asset in virtual non-contrast, gout, contrast enhancement, soft tissue differentiation, lesion characterization, and oncology applications.

Interventional procedures are additionally made easier through Guide&Go, the first tablet-based solution for CT-guided interventions, enabling the interventional radiologist to use traditional touch features rather than a joystick for more precise image manipulation.

Palacio predicts this capability will encourage more practices to take up coronary CT by reducing total cost of ownership and by enhancing confidence among technologists during procedures by providing greater efficiency in practices such as calcium scoring.

“The Go is bringing advanced clinical functionality into segments and to customers before who thought, ‘I probably can't afford the advanced equipment. I'm probably going to buy a refurbished CT, I'm going to have to buy something low-end or make compromises,’” he said. “The Go takes this whole concept and turns it into a reality now, where we are leveraging premium equipment in a value-oriented kind of offering.”

Clearance for the systems, first unveiled at RSNA 2017, follows that of SOMATOM go.Now and SOMATOM go.Up in April 2017.

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