Moving mountains to save patients

摘要

Computer Tomography (CT) scanners are unquestionably one of the greatest life-saving creations of modern healthcare developments but they suffer from one not-so-small problem... they are enormous and heavy. Consequently, they've always been fixed in one location and the precise positional accuracy that's required is achieved by moving the patient into the machine, which is fine for routine diagnostic procedures but not so good for diagnosing trauma victims. According to Wolfgang Reith, a doctor of medicine and Director of the Diagnostic and Interventional Neuroradiology clinic at the Saarland University Hospital in Homburg, brain damage caused by a stroke, a hemorrhage or trauma causes 2 million neurons to die every minute. "Too much time is wasted when patients have to be moved from the emergency unit to a specialist department so that the condition of their blood vessels can be checked using an imaging process," he said.