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Toshiba trimmed its engineering and manufacturing staff at ToshibaAmerica MRI (TAMI) in South San Francisco by about 3% last month.The reduction was aimed at eliminating redundant functions resultingfrom the acquisition of Diasonics' magnetic resonance

Acuson lost a veteran marketing executive last month, promotedseveral top executives, and brought back a former manager whohad left the firm to head up Toshiba's U.S. ultrasound business. "We have made a number of changes in our organizationthat

Siemens will introduce a compact 1-tesla MRI scanner next weekat the Society for Magnetic Resonance Imaging meeting in Chicago.The vendor claims its new offering will fit in more places thanmost mid-field scanners. The space requirement for the

The court cases settled by GE Medical Systems and three independentservice organizations last month all involved GE's assertion ofcopyright protection for its advanced scanner service software.They were not, however, carbon copy agreements, as

Philips Medical Systems has installed the first magnetic resonanceangiography package for its 0.5-tesla Gyroscan T5 magnetic resonanceimaging system. The premier North American clinical test siteis New Britain General Hospital in New Britain, CT.The

Philips Medical Systems International has opened a regional headquartersfor Southeast Asia in Bangkok, Thailand. The existing PhilipsMedical organization in Thailand will be expanded to provide salesand customer support in the member countries of the

Medical Imaging Technologies (Meditech) has encountered delaysin its anticipated launch of fixed-site positron emission tomographyservices. The date has been pushed back from the first to thesecond quarter of this year. The formerly private company

Greenberg Radiology Institute of Highland Park, IL, installedthe first Siemens ECAT 953 positron emission tomography systemin the U.S. last year, according to executive director BenjaminF. Armbruster. The system was developed and produced by the

Imatron, a pioneer in ultrafast computed tomography scanning,signed on Siemens as a product development and marketing partnerthis month. The Siemens relationship involves future CT products and willnot impact Imatron's distribution contracts with

Merge Technologies of Milwaukee has signed OEM agreements withPhilips and Toshiba for supply of its digital medical imaginginterface technology, according to Stuart C. Gardner, vice presidentof sales and marketing. Merge will customize interfaces for

Philips Medical Systems closed its North American dental imagingdivision in January, returning distribution rights and serviceresponsibilities for a panoramic x-ray unit to its manufacturer,Soredex of Helsinki. Soredex Medical Systems, the firm's U.S.

Cardiovascular Imaging Systems (CVIS) and Siemens Ultrasound haveentered into a joint product development/distribution relationshipin intraluminal ultrasound. Siemens showed the CVIS technologyon its SI 1200 high-end cardiology ultrasound system and SI

A federal district judge in Santa Ana, CA, has issued a preliminaryinjunction prohibiting General Electric from making, using orselling computed tomography bone mineral calibration phantoms.The phantoms are the subject of a patent infringement suit

Hostilities may be ceasing in the battle between GE Medical Systemsand the independent scanner service industry. Out-of-court settlementshave been reached in three cases, including a long-standing disputewith R Squared Scan Systems. Settlement of the R

Philips Medical Systems International apparently made a good impressionon visiting Chinese physicians during the 1990 Radiological Societyof North America conference. Authorities in the People's Republicof China ordered a second Philips T5 mid-field

Rediscovering an old idea and applying state-of-the-art technologyto it has enabled a Boston research team working with GE MedicalSystems to implement a novel pulse sequence that could changethe clinical practice of magnetic resonance imaging. The

Toshiba America Medical Systems has sharply focused its U.S. ultrasoundproduct efforts. The vendor has ended the sales of scanners intosuch markets as ob/gyn and urology--which were channeled throughdealers--in order to focus its own direct sales efforts

A Canadian picture archiving and communications systems developeris setting up a dealer network in the U.S. to sell its dedicatedultrasound sub-PACS product. Advanced Light Imaging Technologies(ALI) of Vancouver, British Columbia, has hired James

Advanced Imaging Systems has hired Medical Technology Enterprisesof San Diego to help guide its ultrasound holography system tomarket by year's end. AIS of Richland, WA, controls basic patentsin holographic ultrasound, a technology that has been under

Bruce Moore, former vice president of marketing for the Diasonicsultrasound division, was named president of the division lastmonth. He was previously vice president of marketing for DiasonicsMRI. Moore returned to Diasonics--along with president and

Siemens Medical Systems has delayed filing a 510(k) applicationwith the Food and Drug Administration for marketing its 0.2-teslaMagnetom P8 magnetic resonance imaging system. The company hadplanned to seek FDA clearance in mid-February for its first

Philips hopes that color velocity imaging (CVI) will prove asrevolutionary to the ultrasound profession as the introductionof Acuson's 128-channel imaging eight years ago. CVI has the potentialto provide new information because it uses a non-Doppler

Acuson will introduce a relatively inexpensive ultrasound scannersans color-flow Doppler at the American Institute of Ultrasoundin Medicine meeting in Atlanta this week. The move does not signalAcuson's intention to become a mid- and low-tier ultrasound

The Japanese Ministry of Education has ordered a halt to purchasesof GE medical imaging equipment by national universities, accordingto a Japanese radiologist contacted by SCAN. The ministry's movefollowed the arrest this month of a Chiba University

Diasonics showed initial success last year in refocusing its medicalimaging business on ultrasound and specialty x-ray products, followingthe sale of its magnetic resonance imaging unit to Toshiba inlate 1989. The Milpitas, CA, company lowered its

ATL is pushing its R&D throttle full forward in a bid to breakout from what it considers four-way technological parity at thetop of the high-end ultrasound field. A trio of top-level managershas been appointed to provide the administrative punch

This article is the second of a two-part series. Part one appearedin the last issue of SCAN.Kodak has been granted exclusive rights to manufacture and marketthe computed radiography phosphor plate scanning technology developedby Lumisys of

Following the precedent of computed tomography, the magnetic resonanceimaging market has become price-segmented, said Surya N. Mohapatra,vice president and general manager of Picker International's NMRdivision. There are--particularly in the U.S.--three