Heartbeat: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a CT scanner

May 15, 2020

The imaging team at City Hospital recently played host to an army of high-vis clad engineers from Siemens Healthineers who delivered the newest addition to the imaging department at the Birmingham Treatment Centre (BTC), the new computerised tomography (CT) scanner.

Amongst the beeping fanfare of a crane, engineers carefully peeled away the side wall of the BTC, constructed a reinforced platform and gently lifted, manoeuvred and landed the huge scanner onto the first floor to then be delicately pushed to its new home in the imaging department. CT scanners are innovative scanners that create cross sectional images of the body by rotating an x-ray machine round the body and then use a computer to reconstruct the multiple images into a single three-dimensional image that lets doctors look inside the body. Commonly, CT scanners diagnose infections, fractures and muscle disorders, as well as helping to pinpoint masses and tumours. They are sometimes even used to help guide surgical procedures and biopsies.

To find out more about the scanner, Heartbeat caught up with Phil Spencer, Superintendent Radiographer and CT Lead at our Trust. He said, “The newest scanner we have had delivered is now the fifth CT scanner we have at our disposal. We have two at Sandwell and three at City. This gives us plenty of resources offer imaging support at short notice, as well as resilience, should one of the scanners need to be repaired.”