There are many companies who offer nuclear lung scans within the VA network such as Draximage, Curium, Bracco, Lantheus, Cardinal, GE Healthcare, Jubilant, Novartis, Eckert & Ziegler and IBA Molecular, to name a few.
CYC getting two machines in where a competitor might have been before should not be a concern. It's interesting that they didn't name the hospitals in the CYC media release?
Not all hospitals have the capability to undertake nuclear scans as they don't have the infrastructure to get rid of the nuclear waste and all the safety measures in place to implement nuclear medicine. Only 120 out of over 1000 in the VA have nuclear capabilities, according to what i have found.
Also once the machines are in, they might not get used if there is a better option available in the future, such as a scan that is cheaper, quicker, doesn't need a patient breathing in or injected with a nuclear contrasting agent, doesn't need nuclear waste disposal, and works on existing infrastructure within the hospital.
The true test will be when we have CT VLAS and XV VLAS in nuclear hospitals and they are running side-by-side....It will be interesting to see if nuclear hospitals are slower or quicker to adopt XV technology.
CYC's offering is nothing new or innovative in the grand scheme of things... As I have posted about before, the tech has been around since the 1950s.
in 1955 Dr. David Kuhl and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania pioneered work in nuclear imaging, laying the foundation for what would become V/Q scanning. By 1958 the first applications of nuclear medicine in lung imaging were performed using Xenon-133, a radioactive gas inhaled by patients to measure ventilation (airflow through the lungs). This was the ventilation component of the V/Q scan. Then by 1964, the perfusion component of the scan, which measures blood flow through the lungs, was developed using radiopharmaceuticals such as Technetium-99m (Tc-99m). By the mid-1960s, the combination of these two elements became widely used in clinical settings to detect pulmonary embolisms.
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