CT scanner puts KMC on cutting edge

Patients who show up in cardiac distress at Kootenai Medical Center can take comfort knowing they’ll be diagnosed faster, more accurately and less invasively, thanks to a new $2.5 million, cutting-edge CT scanner.

KMC is the first community hospital in the country – and only the eighth institution nationwide – to install a Siemens SOMATOM Definition dual-source, dual-X-ray computed tomography scanner, a machine so fast it can make real-time images of a beating heart.

“It’s the speed that you want in trauma, it’s the speed that you want in hearts,” said Dr. Albert Martinez, a radiologist and chairman of KMC’s diagnostic imaging department.

Keeping up with about 40,000 emergency room visits each year, including growing numbers of trauma and cardiac cases, was exhausting the capacity of the hospital’s older CT scanner, said Martinez and Scott Venera, the director of diagnostic imaging.

Instead of investing in the last model of old-style scanners, the 64-slice CT, the radiology experts lobbied hard for a leap to the next level of technology.

“It wasn’t an easy sell,” said Martinez, who helped make the pitch to the Kootenai Hospital District’s board of trustees.

But board members ultimately agreed to spring for the equipment that creates highly detailed internal images of the body incredibly quickly.

“It’s pretty cool, even to me, to see it this clearly,” said Martinez, pulling up a 3-D image of his own heart.

In the first month since the new scanner was installed, operators have performed 40 to 50 scans a day, including about 60 heart exams. The machine is so fast, doctors don’t have to administer beta-blockers, drugs that slow the heart.

“We’ve seen some major pathology just in the 60 hearts that we’ve done,” Martinez said.

Using the new scanner is expensive. A typical CT scan costs about $1,200; a scan using the Definition scanner would be about $2,000, Venera said.

But hospital officials hope the scanner will render other, less precise tests unnecessary, reducing overall medical costs.

KMC’s new CT scanner is a boon to the region, some other radiology professionals agreed.

“That is a generation beyond what we have,” said Gerry Altermatt, director of radiology at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane.

“I’d regard it as the next generation of CT scanners.”

Sacred Heart bought a 16-slice CT scanner in 2003 and is looking to replace it, although Altermatt couldn’t say how soon.

“I think they’re a step ahead of everyone on this one,” Altermatt said.