From the September 2021 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


ScanMed
Siemens Healthineers is now a certified supplier of ScanMed’s PROCURE prostate pelvic coil. The coil is certified by Siemens on all of their 1.5T and soon to be 3T systems, and will be available in the company’s online and mailed catalogs of MR scanners and accessories.

“That’s exciting for a small company like ours,” said Randy Jones, founder, president and chief executive officer of ScanMed.
The “plug-and-play coil comes with automatic installation. Clinicians simply need to do a software update to accommodate the coil.

ScanMed also recently introduced pediatric coils with three different sizes, which allows for the 16 antenna elements to be closer to the patient’s anatomy, leading to better performance.

“We’re always considering how we can get it closer to the anatomy,” Jones said. “If you make it big enough for most kids, it compromises image quality for the littler ones.”

Sizing rings, placed over the patient’s head, allows the technologist to choose the correct size without having to take the patient off the table.”

“If a coil doesn’t fit, it takes a while to change the coil on the table,” Jones said. “We’ve eliminated any of that guesswork in changing the coil.”

The company also just finished the first clinical study with top MR vendors, GE Healthcare, Philips and Siemens Healthineers of its ProstatID software, which uses AI to assist radiologists in prostate cancer detection through MR.

Provided through ScanMed’s subsidiary, Bot Image, the software processes the image data and generates a colorized map, with red indicating that there may be a suspicious lesion, which Jones called a “world's first for prostate cancer detection.”

The software auto segments the organ, as well as recognizes and corrects distortion.

“It does the entire function of the radiologist to increase their throughput and confidence,” Jones said.

Siemens Healthineers
In July the FDA cleared Siemens Healthineers’ MAGNETOM Free.Max, a compact whole-body scanner that requires no quench pipe.

The 0.55 T scanner also includes AI and advanced image processing. It is designed to bring these technologies to facilities, such as orthopedic practices and urgent care centers, that are new to MR scanning and want to perform routine, whole-body imaging, said Wesley Gilson, senior director of MR business management for Siemens Healthineers North America.

“We can bring advanced imaging and reconstruction strategies to places where they may not have wanted to utilize MR before,” Gilson said.

The scanner is less than 80 inches high and the lack of a quench pipe allows for easy installation and maintenance, as the closed-loop system uses less than 1 liter of helium.

September 2021 Magazine

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