Cardiac Imaging: Dual Source Computed Tomography (CT)

My name's Heidi Lewis. I am, uh, the director of pediatric radiology here at Lee Health and Golisano Children's Hospital. We chose the Siemens, uh, SumoMe four scanner, particularly for imaging young children, especially cardiac, uh, imaging in pediatric patients with high heart rates. One challenge that we have in pediatric imaging, particularly pediatric cardiac CT, is the high heart rates in little babies, especially neonates. The four scanner has really allowed us to scan these babies by freezing the heart motion because the turbo flash mode is so fast that it essentially freezes the heart in time. Um, we've been able to scan babies as young as one day old, uh, just using the turbo flash mode, not even using EKG gating, and the images are beautiful.

My name is Eric and I'm chief of pediatric Cardiology here at Guston or Children's Hospital. Soma Film forces has exceeded our expectations in its ability to provide, uh, a very small vessel imaging for coronary anomalies, arches, pulmonary vein anomalies for our congenital patients. A unique feature of those similar film forces is ability to obtain the imaging in such a very short amount of time, um, in just a matter of seconds. Uh, that's important for small neonates, uh, because their hearts beat so rapidly, and also it minimizes the need for sedation, uh, which has impact on children. So last week we did a two week old infant with no sedation whatsoever. Um, that has a tremendous impact on the development of that baby over their lifetime.

We recently had a patient, one day old that they needed to scan, uh, because they had some concern of the great vessels in the chest and some anomalous, uh, uh, origins of some of those vessels, uh, that they really needed to figure out the anatomy before surgery. Uh, this was a one day old, uh, performed, um, with no EKG gating, turbo flash mode, um, heart rate around one 30. The images are beautiful. Being the only children's hospital in Southwest for, it's allowed us to keep children and families closer to home. We weren't able to image them here locally before, and they would have to drive at least two hours to get a scan that now we're able to do here, um, and get just as good if not better images than they could have at some of the major children's hospitals. The SOMA 20 Forest, uh, gives us extreme diagnostic confidence in our congenital patients. We're able to provide them immediate answers for their concerns for the congenital cardiac disease. It does that in a matter of seconds, and so just, uh, decreases our need for radiation sedation in overall patient experience for those parents and families.