Toshiba to feature coincidence at SNM show

Toshiba America Medical Systems will present ongoing developments in coincidence imaging at next month’s Society of Nuclear Medicine conference in Toronto. The Tustin, CA-based company will feature its Toshiba E.Cam attenuation correction and coincidence imaging programs, as well as coincidence images displayed on its UltraSPARC workstations.

Toshiba last year won rights to Siemens Medical Systems’ E.Cam, a variable-angle, dual-head gamma camera. Since the agreement, the company has emphasized its Sun Microsystems workstation technology as a point of distinction between its camera and the Siemens offering (SCAN 4/2/97). Adding E.Cam to its product line has enabled the company to participate in the cardiac and coincidence detection segments, said Dan Davis, manager of the company’s nuclear medicine business unit. Toshiba will display E.Cam at the SNM conference, as well as its single-head GCA 7100A, which also is based on the Ultra computer.

At last year’s Radiological Society of North America meeting, Toshiba and Siemens announced the extension of their OEM agreement, taking the deal beyond basic E.Cam sales and adding development of coincidence detection imaging to the partnership. This year, Toshiba plans to offer coincidence-ready E.Cams to customers by mid-summer, with a coincidence software package to follow in the first quarter of 1999. The package will use iterative reconstruction algorithms to process images on Ultra workstations.

In other areas of its SNM booth, Toshiba will present work-in-progress techniques in image fusion, merging nuclear medicine images with CT and MRI scans to create one image that incorporates anatomical and physiological data. The company will also display teleradiology software and programs that translate data from cameras manufactured by other companies to Toshiba computers.