MicroDose Mammography Taken up by European Markets

Scandinavian medical technology provider, Sectra, announced the expansion of the companys micro-dose digital mammography system into three new countries Switzerland, Austria and New Zealand at the European Congress of Radiology in Vienna, Austria, last month. The system is already in use in Sweden, Germany, Ireland, the UK and Australia and in the USA, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) trials are in progress.Sectra MicroDose Mammography is an easy-to-use system that supports the entire workflow, from examination, through the operator work-station in a radiation-protected diagnosis booth, to full diagnostic documentation. The system provides the lowest radiation dose on the market, which means swift, safe, stress-free examinations for the patient. Designed to optimise high volume screening, the system can execute a screen every four minutes and shows four different images (two of each breast) at the same time. The system has been installed at the Karlstal radiology clinic in Kiel, Germany. More than 43,000 new cases of breast cancer are recorded in Germany each year and in the fight against the disease the German state of Schleswig Holstein has initiated a project for quality-assured breast cancer screening called QuaMaDi (Qualitätsgesichert Mamma-Diagnostic) with the goal of facilitating early and reliable diagnosis, known to save lives. We chose Sectra MicroDose Mammography system because of its high image quality, very high throughput and its support for double reading features, all of which are crucial for the QuaMaDi project, said Dr. Schweiger of the Karlstal clinic.Sectra is one of the worlds leading providers of Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) and this year installed a fully digitised system at the neuroradiology department of the Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden. The Karolinska University Hospital performs more than 340,000 radiology examinations a year. Digital processing and archiving of images improves access to images within and between departments. The new Sectra PACS work-station uses a new proprietary method for data retrieval to display large stacks within seconds (5,000 images and more). The system is optimised to perform at point-of-care, whether inside the hospital of for referring physicians located outside the firewall. With the digitisation of the Neuroradiology Department at the Karolinska University Hospital all radio­logy departments in Stockholm County are now ­entirely film-free.To back up their PACS installations Sectra now offer a streamlined support service called PACS-Guard for all new and existing users. This provides real-time seven day/24 hour monitoring of critical system performance. The launch customer for this new service is MidState Medical Center in Meriden, Connecticut, USA. The break-fix model traditionally applied to servicing imaging modalities is simply not appropriate for something as mission-critical as IT components, says Dr. John Goble, President of Sectra, North America. Mathilde Boulachin, Market Communications director adds; Basically it means that if your system goes down, we know before you do, and we fix it.