Your Guide to Medical Imaging Equipment

A dependable digital mammography unit is the cornerstone of any women's health department. Among the leaders in the digital mammo modality is the Hologic Selenia series.

While the Selenia's performance has earned it this place of favor, it's still subject to some of the same service and maintenance pratfalls of any digital X-ray equipment. One of the most serious among these is the eventuality of digital detector failure.

To help all you Selenia users out there prepare for this a little better, we've compiled information from the experiences of our parts and service teams and the facilities they serve to bring you typical cost, lifespan, and replacement information for your Hologic Selenia digital detector.

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. 

Q: What do GE digital mammography systems, your car, and your own body have in common?

A: When someone tells you there’s a serious problem with one of them, it pays to get a second opinion.

In the case of the GE mammo, we’re referring specifically to a diagnosis of “bad detector”. The detector is one of the most expensive parts to replace on a digital mammography system. With used models falling anywhere in a vast range from $30,000 to $100,000 depending on the model of your system, this kind of diagnosis from a service engineer is almost the worst news a digital mammo owner can hear, second only to having the entire machine carried away by a freak tornado and dropped through the roof of a reclusive conspiracy theorist.

If you’ve recently heard bad detector news or worry that someday you might, we have a few words of comfort for you: It might not be your detector