RONAN - The 64-slice computerized tomography (CT) scanner at St. Luke Hospital started saving lives before a doctor ever put a patient through it.
The radiology staff at St. Luke's went through extensive training in California to learn how to use the technology made possible by the machine, which was purchased eight months ago at a cost of $1.2 million.
You're on and off the table in a matter of seconds.
The bells and whistles in the computer software then allow doctors to examine your insides from every conceivable angle and in what seems like every conceivable way.
While you're back on the golf course, or at work, or sound asleep in bed, they can cut your heart in half on a computer screen and examine it from the inside-out, sift through your brain layer by layer, or do a “fly-through” of your colon looking for polyps.
And so the technicians were practicing on the images provided by the 50 volunteers when they noticed something strange on one of them: a small shadow on an artery in the heart.
This particular heart belonged to Wayne Fuchs, public relations and marketing director for St. Luke's Community Healthcare Network, who had agreed to be one of the guinea pigs.
“Wayne is a healthy male in his late 50s, a jogger, a runner with no serious health problems who volunteered,” Sivak says.
The shadow noticed by the technicians turned out to be a 90 percent blockage of the left anterior descending artery.
“The widowmaker, they call it,” Sivak says.
Fuchs' cardiologist, Dr. Bill Hull of the Montana Heart Center in Missoula, performed an angiogram and inserted a stent to reopen the artery.
Had the blockage not been caught by the St. Luke technicians and Fuchs had suffered a heart attack, Hull told the St. Luke Community Healthcare Network newsletter, there is a 50 percent to 60 percent chance the heart attack would have been fatal, “and a 100 percent chance he would have experienced a significantly diminished lifestyle due to loss of heart muscle.”
The CT scanner - St. Luke's was manufactured by Toshiba - looks like a giant doughnut with a bed in front of it.
Patients lie down on the bed, which passes through the hole in the middle of the scanner and then returns.
While going through the opening, the scanner takes cross-sectional pictures of the internals of an object - in this case, 64 different views of a single slice of the body every half a millimeter.
The huge series of two-dimensional X-rays is then used to generate a three-dimensional image on the computer screen.
A cardiologist may only want pictures of the heart; a neurologist may want just the brain, or spinal cord. But the resolution is phenomenal, Sivak says, especially when compared to what doctors had to work with off the old single- and two-slice machines.
“That's 64 different views off one spin,” technician Dave Siegfried says. “That's 64 times more information on one spin. It's ‘Star Wars' technology. I'm skipping to work since we got this.
“You can tell we're super-excited,” Sivak says. “It's wonderful to be able to bring this type of care to our patients in the valley.”
While St. Luke's isn't the only hospital of its size - in this case, 25 beds - with a 64-slice scanner, it was one of the first. It purchased its scanner with its cardiology program in mind, but one of the next things the hospital may make it available to the general public for are virtual colonoscopies.
Far less invasive than a regular colonoscopy, the scanner makes it possible for pictures of the colon to be taken from outside the body, rather than running a camera into the colon through the rectum.
The scanner has already been used on patients who have had “failed” colonoscopies - i.e., procedures where a doctor was unable to maneuver the camera through the entire colon.
On a computer screen, Sivak shows how the colon “fly-through” is done on a patient who has been through the 64-slice CT scanner.
As he directs the cursor through the patient's colon on the screen, it seems almost like one of those race car computer games - run the cursor into a wall of the twisting and turning colon, and the computer beeps at you and you have to back up and take another run at it.
But in a couple of minutes - he's going faster than the doc would - Sivak has negotiated seven feet of virtual colon. He can stop and click on anything suspicious.
Not yet reimbursed by third-party payers, virtual colonoscopies still cost a fraction of a regular one ($1,100 vs. $3,000 to $4,000, according to Sivak) and patients might be more inclined to have this procedure.
They still have to have something inserted through their rectum, but in this case it's carbon dioxide, which inflates the colon to allow for better viewing. At the worst, Siegfried says, it feels like you've got gas.
And of course, if polyps are discovered, a regular colonoscopy, where they can be cut out, will have to be performed.
But the scanner is a giant leap for the rural hospital, Sivak says. A head scan that used to take five minutes and took a picture every 5 millimeters on the old equipment, now takes five seconds and takes pictures every half a millimeter on the new.
Best of all, he says: Patients no longer have to hit the road to Missoula or Kalispell to take advantage of the technology.
It's right here in Ronan.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)