A new portable CT scanner at the Sturgeon Community Hospital will improve wait times and image quality compared to the unit it is replacing, according to hospital staff.
“This is really upper-hand from what we had before. This particular unit takes 320 slices as opposed to the other one we had, which took 16 slices,” said Joe Lopes, director of radiology at the hospital.
Lopes said the scanner, which arrived in January, will also allow staff to perform virtual colonoscopies.
“We can feed you some drinks and we can scan you and then reconstruct all that and virtually follow it through the bowel,” he said.
Currently, staff can perform approximately 40 scans per day. For outpatients, there is about a seven-day wait to have a CT scan done, but no wait for inpatients.
“We’re really excited about it. It’s state of the art. I would say it’s probably one of the best you can get,” said Dr. Jeff Baron, site radiology lead at the hospital.
He said the facility did not perform cardiac CTs before the new unit arrived.
“Because of the slice thickness that we get now and the resolution that we get now, we’re able to do it. It didn’t really exist here before,” he said.
Baron said the new unit technology will also allow staff to acquire an image with a much lower radiation dose, in some cases up to 50 per cent less.
“A lot of that is because it’s so much faster, it actually takes quicker to do the study. We can do a head in less than a second now,” he said.
“A lot of the push in technology in CT is to further reduce dose so that’s one of the major criteria we used to choose a scanner.”
The new unit, a Toshiba Aquilon 320 CT scanner, comes with a $1.3-million dollar price tag, plus $700,000 for renovations to accommodate the equipment.
According to the province, an additional $1.8 million is being invested in St. Albert over the next three years as part of the Government of Alberta’s Health Capital Plan. Funds will be used to purchase other hospital equipment, including two new sterilizers, 38 electric beds and a portable X-ray machine.
The funding will also be used to maintain the fire alarm and lighting systems at the St. Albert Public Health Clinic.
