Replacement CT Tubes Developed to Deliver Patient Dose Within OEM Guidelines

New X-ray and computed tomography (CT) tubes are engineered to be identical in form, fit, and function and are tested to ensure proper operation, optimal image quality, and dose rates well within guidelines published by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM).

Dunlee (Aurora, IL, USA), a division of Philips Healthcare (Best, The Netherlands), is a manufacturer of replacement X-ray tubes compatible with CT scanners from most major OEMs. Recently, with the growing concern about radiation safety, physicians, radiation physicists, biomedical engineers, and hospital administrators need to validate patient dose rates. Dunlee sponsored an independent study to assess whether their replacement tubes delivered a comparable dose to the OEM tube.

This study was conducted by Dr. Robert L. Dixon, PhD, an independent hospital physicist and president of Radiological Physics Consultants (Winston-Salem, NC, USA), to measure and evaluate the use of Dunlee tubes on GE Healthcare (Chalfont St., Giles, UK) CT systems and to determine whether Dunlee CT replacement tubes deliver a dose within the published GE specifications for its own CT scanners equipped with a comparable GE tube. Dose measurements were made on three clinical CT scanners of each type (GE VCT and LightSpeed-16 scanners) with the appropriate Dunlee replacement tubes installed by in-house CT service engineers.

According to Dr. Dixon, “The Dunlee replacement tubes for both the GE VCT scanner and the GE Lightspeed-16 slice scanners were found to deliver a radiation dose which is indistinguishable from that of the GE tube it replaces as specified in the respective GE technical manuals for each scanner model.”

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Radiological Physics Consultants