Your Guide to Medical Imaging Equipment

GE 1.5T MRI scanners are among the most popular systems in the world. They're reliable, easy to service, and when maintained properly, produce high-quality images. Still, like any frequently-used machine, they are subject to wear and tear and eventual parts failure.

If you're new to GE 1.5T ownership or considering a purchase, the following are some of the most common parts failures reported to our service team. Keep them in mind to help you and your team stay ahead of equipment downtime.

For years, the conventional wisdom in the interventional radiology space was that it was most advantageous for peripheral studies to be conducted on cath labs with larger detectors. Even here, on the Block Imaging blog page, we've discussed matching detector sizes with applications and recommended using 40 cm detectors like those on the Innova 4100 for peripheral. More and more, however, we're hearing from some users that they prefer using the 20 cm detectors on their Innova 2100s for this work.

In response to this trend, we'd like to share with you why some cath lab users are using their small detector systems, like the Innova 2100, for peripheral studies.

The OEC 9800 is a stalwart, go-to C-arm system in thousands of hospitals and clinics, and if you look into the C-arm marketplace for even a minute, refurbished 9800s will be one of the first few systems you see. Of course, the notoriety of an established system doesn't mean that relative newcomers don't have anything to offer your facility. This is precisely why we'd like to share more with you about a model that has found its way onto the secondary market in more recent years: Genoray's Zen-7000.

Watch the brief video clip below to see how the OEC 9800 and the Genoray Zen-7000 stack up in terms of features, performance, and user experience.

If you're new to the world of MRI, there's a learning curve that can take a good chunk of time to master. Safety, maintenance, cryogens, parts- each of these areas has its own set of particulars and minding each of them will help you run your system and serve your patients more efficiently.

We first published this article in 2015 to help new MRI users become better acquainted with a part that's crucial to monitor for better scanner performance and lower maintenance costs: the cold head. Three years later, this is advice is as valuable as ever. Keep reading to learn what a cold head does, how long it lasts, how much it costs, and some service tips to keep it in good condition.

Block Imaging's imaging equipment Service Team, confronts a broad variety of equipment issues every day. Recently, an account we handle experienced "sticking" or "binding" between the gears in their OEC 9900 CCD camera.

Fortunately, we were able to diagnose their problem and get them scanning again quickly. If you notice a similar problem emerging in your system, keep reading to learn what to expect from a CCD camera gear repair.

Need a CCD camera now? Click here to request one.