Body category

"You know, we knew we had the radiation low enough," Herman Potgieter recalls initial attempts to introduce the Statscan to the medical community. "But when we went to Germany to talk about using it in a medical setting, the big companies said it wasn't possible to make such a machine."

Potgieter and his group had the last laugh when they invited medical teams back to have a look at what they'd created. "It turned out to be their own enthusiasm that made us know how important this was. A head of radiation at one hospital spent a whole day showing us the requirements of what was needed in their work.

"And we had developed this technology for De Beers, the big diamond company, to detect diamonds on people who had swallowed or otherwise hidden them."

Today in its newest iteration, the Lodox® Statscan® VE1 is an X-ray system specifically aimed at the needs of emergency medical centers, giving critical life-saving information to the medical staff, enabling them to have a complete picture – literally from head to toe – of a patient's injuries.  It is faster, safer and operates with less interference on patient stabilization than previous technologies.

"There are three things that  distinguish the technology and make it so attractive for medical applications," Potgieter says.

"First, the low radiation levels," estimated to be some 75 percent below other technologies. "The scattered radiation is so low that authorities allow us to put it right inside a resuscitation area in a hospital's emergency-treatment area.

"The second advantage is the size of our images. It's very rare to see medical diagnostic quality at such sizes," featuring a high-contrast resolution of some 16,000 grays levels.

"And third thing is the speed and convenience.  In the time it takes the surgeon to put on his gloves, we can have a full body image waiting."

Applications in the medical community include bullet and knife wounds in South Africa, Potgieter says. He recalls a case in which the Statscan revealed that a patient was carrying a bullet doctors didn't realize had been lodged in his body. "And there was another instance of a bus accident. Five people needed to be scanned very fast. This made that possible."

Lodox, the company formed around the technology, today is in talk with military medical experts, including officials in the United States. "The military is very excited about it," Potgieter says, "although there's a philosophical question because the current thinking it that it's better to get the wounded off the field and into expert care centers." And trying to transport the Statscan to a field hospital is hard. "It's quite a big, heavy bit of equipment," Potgieter says. "You need a Hercules" aircraft to move it.

But some 25 installations now are active in medical settings, he says, the first exported system having been the R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., in the United States.  Officials at the Cowley Center point out that normal X-ray processing time can be some 30 to 40 minutes. The Statscan produces an equivalent set of images within five minutes.

"The images can be viewed within eight seconds on a local monitor," the Cowley's Web site reports. "Or transmitted to the electronic imaging network within the trauma center."

The latest iteration of the design, Potgieter says, called VE1, "is smaller and goes into standard shipping containers, to make it install more easily."

And he good-naturedly adds a little laugh at himself and his fellow former hot-diamond hunters: "Our biggest design flaw originally," he says, "was the trolley for the patient.  We needed to take into account how to get the patient into the right position, move him up or down. we went through three trolleys to get it right."

Coming applications may involve security systems, Potgieter says, because being true X-ray technology, the Lodox approach doesn't "see through" the clothing of airline passengers who are being screened as some surface screening processes do, but instead reveals only shadows and shapes that inspectors need to see, "so you can tell if the person has swallowed contraband of some kind."

Designed by:

J.H. Potgieter; C.M.D.S. Sousa; P. van Looy; A.G.J. Vermeulen; A. Booysen, R.C. Sandwith & J. Louw, South Africa.

www.lodox.com