Your Guide to Medical Imaging Equipment

It's not news to anybody that space is money. The square footage at your center/clinic/practice comes at a price, so you try to use it as efficiently and effectively as you can. Because of this "economy of space", our team receives regular requests from users hoping to save space with a compact all-in-one C-arm; that is, a C-arm that eliminates the need for a monitor cart by mounting the monitor(s) on the C-arm itself.

The request makes perfect sense, and an all-in-one C-arm can definitely save you some space, but reaping the benefit of compact design comes with some trade-offs too. Let's break down the pros and cons of choosing an all-in-one C-arm and see what the options are.

Inside every C-arm X-ray tube (and any other X-ray tube for that matter) there is a cathode and an anode. The cathode receives incoming electrical current from the machine's generator and emits a beam of electrons onto the anode, where we'll focus our attention today.

In the next few paragraphs, we’ll tell you the difference between rotating and fixed anodes and which kind of anode might be best for your facility.

More and more we speak with managers and physicians from practices that use C-arms and want to add more viewing monitors to streamline their workflow. One thing we share with all of them is that there are a number of ways to do that, but none of them are one-size-fits-all. The following are three of the most common ways we've seen C-arm users increase their OR speed and visibility with extra monitors.