Digital X-ray imaging leverages flat-panel receptor technology to transform industries where success hinges on seeing hidden structures quickly, clearly, and cost-effectively.

The patient has suffered a severe stroke. Around him, a team of doctors needs to come up with a treatment plan. Fast. But exactly where is the blood flow problem, and how bad is it? Fortunately this is Osaka City University Hospital, and the interventional room where this drama is playing out happens to be state-of-the-art. Almost anywhere else, the medical team would be shuttling the patient back and forth between imaging systems, even between rooms. Here, an advanced digital angiographic system from Hitachi Medical Corporation with flat-panel imaging technology from Varian Medical Systems quickly generates 3D vascular images that can answer the team’s questions—in time to help save the patient’s life.

An emerging technology that is rapidly taking hold across a spectrum of applications, Varian’s flat-panel detectors (FPDs) are beginning to transform whole industries.

In healthcare, FPD-based systems offer such significant benefits that hospitals without them suffer a competitive disadvantage. In dentistry and veterinary medicine, specialists and service labs using FPD-based digital radiography can offer faster turnaround and better consults to doctors. In other industries, FPDs save so much time in nondestructive testing and inspection that some work would simply never get done without them.

NEW IMAGING OVERTAKES OLD
In the early 1990s Varian partnered with Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center to develop some of the first flat-panel X-ray imaging systems. Based on amorphous silicon technology, these FPDs resemble the LCD screens on computers and flat-screen televisions, but they act as receptors, not emitters. They work by converting X rays striking their surface into electronic data that computers can interpret and instantly display as high-quality digital images.

Varian’s PaxScan® FPDs are known for being able to do both fast fluoroscopy (real-time moving images, for positioning and verification) and superior radiography (single-shot, higher resolution images, for diagnosis). In fact, Varian has a technological lead in FPD fluoroscopy, thanks to sophisticated electronics that can process data and display images at rates of up to 60 frames per second—fast enough to let doctors track a moving tumor, observe blood flowing through a kidney, or carefully guide a catheter into a premature infant or a beating heart.

Today Varian is a volume manufacturer of FPDs. Many are incorporated into the advanced cancer treatment systems offered by Varian’s own Oncology Systems business, including the On-Board Imager™ and PortalVision™ devices for tracking and targeting tumors accurately, and the Acuity™ imaging system for verifying and simulating radiotherapy treatments. Shipments to external customers also ramped up significantly in 2004, as imaging equipment manufacturers and integrators capitalized on the versatility and performance advantages of flat-panel imaging.

One of the major advantages of FPDs is their compact size. Devices competing with FPDs, such as image-intensifier tubes (known as “IIs”), are typically much heavier, larger, and more awkward to work around and use. Compared to image intensifiers, FPDs have a longer service life and are able to instantly create distortion-free images that are rectangular, like traditional X-ray films, and highly detailed, even over large regions of interest. In addition, FPDs can significantly reduce the radiation dose to the patient.

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