SMV America to use SNM show to highlight new single-head camera

DSXi is upgradable to dual-head configuration

Nuclear medicine vendor SMV America plans to showcase a new single-head gamma camera that is upgradable to a dual-head variable-angle model at the upcoming Society of Nuclear Medicine meeting in Toronto. SMV’s DSXi camera broadens the company’s product line and makes its single-head offerings more competitive, according to Bill Bishop, vice president of business development for the Twinsburg, OH-based company.

SMV was formed in 1995 through the merger of gamma camera vendors Summit Nuclear and Sopha Medical (SCAN 6/21/95). Summit was prominent in digital gamma camera technology, while at the time of the merger Sopha was one of the few nuclear medicine vendors to offer a variable-angle dual-head gamma camera. The new company suffered a few turbulent initial years, but now appears to be back on track: In the month of December, SMV set a company record with more than $8 million in U.S. sales.

DSXi is designed to make SMV more competitive in the single-head segment, and the system began shipping this month. It carries the same detector as the variable-angle DST-XL, as well as the same open-gantry configuration and long-access SPECT capability, which saves imaging time during oncology applications.

SMV acknowledges that the single-head segment is shrinking, and now represents only 25% of the total market for gamma cameras. But DSXi’s upgradability will appeal to those hospitals that don’t want to spring for a dual-head right away, but would like to have the option to do so in the future. DSXi’s price depends on configuration but remains comparable to previous single-head models in SMV’s product line, Bishop said.

SMV will also present its Transmission Attenuation Correction (TAC) technology at the SNM meeting as part of a package that includes the vendor’s Stasis motion correction algorithm and Restore depth-dependent resolution recovery and scatter reduction technique. After four years of development, SMV began shipping the package in April for SPECT and gated SPECT studies, using both thallium and technetium. Company executives believe that SMV’s measured approach to the technology will help it avoid problems other companies have encountered.

“The best analogy to describe our TAC program is the tortoise and the hare,” said Lonnie Mixon, vice president of clinical marketing. “There were several companies that early on jumped out of the gate, throwing on transmission sources and creating transmission maps, starting to scale up internal structures, with very little regard for preliminary image preparation. We have refined and sharpened the image as much as possible.”

Finally, SMV will display images from its Volumetric Coincidence Reconstruction (VCR) program, highlighting the program’s use of Fourier rebinning (FORE) and ordered subset expectation maximization (OSEM), iterative reconstruction algorithms used to interpret data. The company will feature what it calls PET-equivalent corrections, including randoms correction, as part of its VCR package. SMV will also present new 332-MHz IBM RS/6000 workstations, as well as DICOM software and IBM’s continuous voice recognition program, MedSpeak, Bishop said.