Siemens Healthineers in Thailand launched the “NAEOTOM Alpha,” the world’s first CT scanner with “Photon-counting”, a ground-breaking technology that enables drastic improvements in Medical Imaging, which surpass the image quality generated by traditional CT Scanners. With a novel system concept and pioneering new detector technology on CT scanner, this latest innovation, soon to be officially launched in Thailand after the success in an initial global launch in 2021, will exceed capabilities in medical imaging diagnostics and transform medical technology to the new era.
Conventional CT imaging has reached its technical limitations: Resolution can only be improved by small margins and dose cannot be reduced significantly: Photon-counting technology enables drastic improvements. These improvements include an increase in resolution and a reduction in radiation dose by up to 45 percent for ultra-high resolution (UHR) scans compared with conventional CT detectors with a UHR comb filter. This would be impossible with conventional detectors. Photon-counting scans contain more useable data, as photon-counting technology directly detects each X-ray photon and its energy level instead of first converting it into visible light as with conventional CT imaging.
These aspects of NAEOTOM Alpha combined leads to new capabilities, such as scanning a patient’s lung at a high scan speed and getting high-resolution images with inherent spectral information–without the patient having to hold their breath. This spectral information also helps to identify materials inside the body that can even be removed from the image should they obstruct an area of interest. This helps physicians to assess issues quickly and offers the possibility to start treatment early. Through the reduction in radiation dose, regular examinations, such as lung cancer screenings using CT imaging can become routinely available for larger patient populations. And the high resolution reveals even small structures, taking clinical decision-making to a new level of confidence.