The CT scanner to capture your heart—whatever your heart rate

As if it isn’t incredible enough that we can look inside the human body without breaking the skin, GE’s latest computed tomography scanner, the Revolution CT, achieves revolutionary clarity of internal imaging at radiation doses up to 82% lower than were previously required to achieve images half as clear. It captures its images within fractions of a second, enabling a diagnostic view inside previously unscannable patients: those with rapid or irregular heartbeats, for example.
The potential for saving time, unnecessary trauma, money, hospital resources and lives is both measurable and movingly anecdotal. The Revolution CT has this year been installed in five locations across Australia and New Zealand. The earliest adopter, interventional radiologist Glen Schlaphoff and his team at Spectrum Medical Imaging in Liverpool, NSW, are using it to do ground-breaking work in cardiac imaging.

We’re going in!

The patient has an extremely irregular heartbeat—it jumps between 53 to 126 beats per minute. “In the past,” says Kevin Waldon, an experienced radiographer at Spectrum, “We would have seen this guy and thought, ‘There’s no way...’ I would have called Glen and asked whether we should even be attempting it, and he would have called the referring cardiologist...” Instead, given the Revolution’s capabilities, Waldon confidently administers the routine injection of “contrast” or iodine, which is used to highlight the blood vessels in the heart for the resulting image.

The patient lies on the narrow cushioned bed as it slides into the magic circle: the pale, softly glowing iced doughnut of the scanner. The Revolution’s expanded bore, at 80cm, is a mighty big doughnut which means there’s less likelihood that the patient will feel claustrophobic. The machine whirrs—considering that inside the doughnut more than a tonne of machinery is doing one complete turn around the patient every 0.28 seconds, it is amazingly quiet.