University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, one of the biggest and busiest NHS Trusts in the country, has praised the benefits of a ceiling-mounted Alphenix Sky+ interventional imaging system six months on from becoming the first location in the UK to receive the solution from Canon Medical.
The Trust, serving one million residents in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland, has commended its great advantages to patients and clinicians, enabling less invasive medical procedures with lower associated risk to improve patient recovery times and shorten hospital stays.
Greater visualisation of anatomical details at lower dose also improves clinical confidence, giving earlier patient diagnoses and swifter treatment planning.
The Alphenix Sky+ is located at the Leicester General Hospital site and has been designed to accept that every patient is different, and that unrestricted access is key for expanding clinical procedures.
For example, its 270° C-arm rotation around the table gives great flexibility for patient access and procedure planning.
“The double C-arm design of the Alphenix Sky+ means that we can do a CT spin from the patient’s side rather than from the head and enable prostate imaging on tall patients.
This will increase our imaging flexibility for a range of different procedures, and also understands the individuality of every patient we see,” states Sarita Modi, Superintendent Radiographer at Leicester’s Hospitals.
“We needed to future-proof our interventional imaging services with a new system that would give us greater reliability, better imaging resolution and further advances to expand our patient services.
The Alphenix Sky+ with 3D workstation ticked all the boxes and has impressed us from the start,” continues Sarita Modi.
The Alphenix system features a unique ‘Dose Tracking System’ that tracks X-ray beam movement and provides real-time feedback on skin dose information, mapping it visually as a simple, colour-coded visual on the system interface. This advanced warning system gives quick and easy-to-see alerts to operators to adjust C-arm angulation, frame rate settings and collimation to reduce skin dose.
“Early UK evaluations following the launch of the Alphenix interventional imaging system suggest the potential for a 50% dose reduction to patients when compared with replaced systems and UK National Diagnostic Reference Levels (NDRLs),” states Daniel Parr, XR Modality Manager at Canon Medical Systems UK.
“The dose display is unique to the Alphenix and a giant leap for interventional radiology in managing ionizing radiation for both staff and patients.”
