> Home > About Us > News/Events

For immediate release:  March 30, 2007

HRMC Installs Revolutionary CT Imaging Technology

New Hospital Machine Speeds Physician Diagnosis of Trauma, Heart Disease, Stroke and Chest Pains

Haywood Regional Medical Center has acquired a new, state-of-the-art, CT imaging system from GE Healthcare. The LightSpeed® VCT is the world’s first Volume Computed Tomography (VCT) system. This means that HRMC now offers an innovative way for Haywood physicians to obtain the information they need to diagnose patients with chest pain and life-threatening illnesses -- including cardiovascular disease and stroke. It also increases how rapidly patients who have undergone trauma, such as a car accident, receive detection of internal injuries.

HRMC physicians are now able to capture images of a beating heart in five heartbeats, an organ in one second, and perform whole body trauma in ten seconds, more than twice as fast as conventional multi-slice CT scanners. This speed is especially helpful in shortening breath hold procedures for geriatric patients, patients who are on ventilators and pediatric patients.

In a single rotation, the LightSpeed VCT creates 64 high-resolution anatomical images as thin as a credit card. These images are combined to form a three-dimensional view of the patient’s anatomy.

“This new CT system allows our physicians to perform new and enhanced procedures and obtain the information they need to diagnose patients who are suffering from chest pains or stroke,” said Russ Cain, Director of Radiology. “Volume CT is extremely patient friendly. Fast scans can help reduce patient stress and anxiety, and some of the volume CT procedures can be done in only one simple exam. ”

“When someone is in a severe, unrestrained, motor vehicle accident the best thing to do is, after the patient is stabilized in the emergency room is to scan that patient from the top of the head down to the pelvis,” Richard Lang, MD with Haywood Medical Imaging said. “Doing this with the LightSpeed VCT could reveal a brain injury; a fractured cervical-spine; a collapsed lung, or fluid in the lung that would require drainage through a chest tube; or to see if the patient might have a ruptured spleen or liver and require immediate abdominal surgery.”

Dr. Lang revealed that when he first came to HRMC 12 years ago, the CT scanner in use at that time took 30 minutes to scan from the top of the head to the pelvis and another 30 minutes to process the image.

“Back then, I had a lot of surgeons anxiously waiting in the radiology area wanting to know what they needed to do to treat the patient,” he said. “But with the new 64-slice CT scanner, we have the potential to have the patient scanned and the access the information available in 11 seconds.”

HRMC now offers the following innovative procedures to be performed on their new LightSpeed VCT:

• 5-Beat Cardiac™ - The physicians at HRMC can capture images
  of the whole heart and coronary arteries in just five heartbeats – providing clearer images of cardiovascular anatomy requiring a shorter breath hold for sick and
  elderly patients.
• Triple RuleOut™ - Three primary causes of mortality in patients with chest pains are aortic dissection, pulmonary embolism and coronary artery disease. The physicians at HRMC now have a tool to help them rule out (or in) these three individual causes of a patient’s chest pains through a single, quick scan.
• Stroke Work-Up - Once a stroke occurs, it is commonly believed that treatment must be delivered within an hour or less to ensure the best outcome for the patient. The LightSpeed VCT offers HRMC the speed and resolution required for rapid imaging of blood vessels in the brain. This enables physicians to make a quick diagnosis and determine the best course of treatment while reducing the number of exams a patient may need to undergo.

“We’re breaking barriers in speed and accuracy of patient exams and are now able to offer new and enhanced diagnostic procedures thanks to our new LightSpeed VCT,” Lang said. “ Our administration will settle for nothing but the very best. And the addition of this technology is greatly benefiting both the physicians and patients of Western North Carolina.”