Your Guide to Medical Imaging Equipment

Proper room dimensions for a GE cath/angio lab is a topic of frequent discussion here in the Block Imaging project management department. We’ve been asked so many times, by so many people that several of us got the dimensions tattooed on our forearms for quick reference. Later, in a deep fit of tattoo regret, we decided it would have been a better idea to simply post them on our blog- hence, the post you are reading right now.

If you are considering the purchase of a GE cath lab, you’ll want to check the size of the room you plan to have it installed in against the OEM recommendations in the table below. These recommendations are guidelines, not firm rules, but they can help you begin to plan for your incoming lab.

Under-powered, under-utilized, and sometimes misunderstood, open MRI systems are often under-appreciated here in the USA and ignored in other “developed” countries. 

Many radiologists don’t want to read from open MRIs, governments and insurers don’t want to pay for them, and the appetite for higher and higher powered magnets has, in many cases, relegated the open MRI to a “back-up” role in larger imaging facilities. Whether or not that relegation is deserved, it’s a fact that the demand for low-field open MRI (.2T - .35T) has remained strong in developing countries since this article was last updated in early 2016. So what exactly is it that makes some facilities prize low-field open MRI over closed MRI? We've found a few reasons we'll share here.

For those entering the cath lab market for the first time, there are scads of options on the table as you begin doing your homework and narrowing down the field. One of the major options you'll run across is whether you want a single or bi-plane cath lab system. To help you make that determination, we've compiled a short list of things you should know first.

Single and bi-plane cath labs differ from one another in several main ways:

1. Image Acquisition Speed
2. Specialization
3. Space Requirements
4. Site Preparation
5. Cost