Your Guide to Medical Imaging Equipment

If you use an OEC 9800 C-arm, you're probably already familiar with the series of arrows that move across the display panels during the boot up sequence. You probably also know that if boot up is interrupted while those arrows are still on the display, counting the number of arrows the machine has made it to will tell you what type of boot-up problem your system is experiencing. What you might not know, and what we hope to share with you today, is what it means when your 9800 stops five arrows into boot up. 

From where to have lunch to when to retire, life is filled with decisions that require careful consideration. Not the least of these is how to protect your CT, MRI, X-ray, or other medical imaging equipment with service and maintenance coverage.

No two imaging facilities are exactly alike, and that's why there is some flexibility among the plans you'll find on the service market. To help reduce your legwork as you enter the service market, we'll cover here three common imaging equipment service plans offered by service providers.

If you use mobile imaging equipment (C-arm, ultrasound, endoscope, arthroscope) that doesn't have native DICOM, getting images from those systems onto your network will require a special solution. That's exactly where the MediCapture recorder comes into play. Of course, there are several varieties of MediCapture, so there's going to be a little leg work required to find out which one best fits your needs.

Fortunately for you, we've done the leg work and compiled it below. Read on for a comparison of the MediCapture series of image transfer systems and their different capabilities.

Because Block Imaging has installed so many refurbished C-arms, we have also been privy to the aches, pains, and woes of buying too much C-arm for the room(s) you had planned on putting it in. To help prevent all of that, we've compiled the ballpark dimensions of a typical full-sized C-arm machine and table, as well as several other considerations to bear in mind as you plan for your new system.

Much of what you’ll read is based on the measurements of an OEC 9800 with a 9” image intensifier. Given how common that model is, the specifications should be a great place to start in figuring the space needed for a number of models.

Whether your facility is in the US and measures radiation absorbed dose in milligrays, or is in Europe or Asia and measures in rads, there's a setting on the OEC 9800 to express that measurement in the preferred unit. Change this setting to keep communication clear and to save yourself the trouble of doing the conversion in your head every time you have a case.

To make things easier for yourself, you can change the dose units on your OEC 9800 between rad and mGy in the three easy steps pictured below. And if you don't already know how to convert between these two units, stick around until the end. We'll share that with you too.