With expertise in more than 50 paediatric specialties, Children’s Hospital & Medical Centre in Omaha has the largest group of speciality paediatric physicians in Nebraska and serves children throughout a five-state region. Children’s Criss Heart Centre was ranked among the best paediatric cardiology programs in the nation by U.S. News & World Report in 2019. The centre offers comprehensive cardiac care programs for both children and adults with congenital heart disease, including paediatric heart transplantation.
Children’s state-of-the-art cardiac catheterization lab (cath lab) features a robotic 3D imaging system manufactured by Siemens Healthineers, called the ARTIS pheno — making it the first paediatric cath lab in the world to use this camera.
What makes this technology so revolutionary is its fusion functionality, which allows physicians to align an active fluoroscopic image to a previously obtained MRI or CT scan to develop a 3D roadmap for the cardiac catheterization procedure.
With the introduction of the ARTIS pheno, Children’s wanted to ensure that cardiologists and the cardiovascular interventional radiographers had the most realistic training possible. “To test and train, you want to make the scenario as lifelike as possible. That way your patients are not receiving additional radiation or contrast once they’re on the table because you’ve already practiced your approach,” explained Gabe Linke B.S, ARRT (R)(MR), Advanced Imaging Program Coordinator at Children’s.
The problem was that the most realistic training option at the time was to use live patients. However, subjecting such young and fragile patients to more radiation than necessary was out of the question. Another option for interfacing with and testing the new technology was to scan a cell phone and practice fusing the images. But cell phones are not representative of actual human anatomy, so the team sought out a better solution.
