Philips' Brilliance iCT sure had a nice run, but no sooner than it hit the spotlight, Toshiba has arrived fashionably late to steal a little thunder. The outfit's $2.5 million AquilionONE outdoes Philips' iteration by doing 320-slices instead of "just" 256, enabling doctors to see the entire heart while making patients hold their breath for merely "a second or two." Put simply, the machine should allow for heart disease to be spotted in its earliest stages without putting individuals through a lengthy tribulation, and the ultra high resolution 3D images it produces will allow medical personnel to quickly determine if there are any problems that need to be dealt with. Currently, the system is being tested at Toronto General's Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, but word on the street has the unit being readily available next summer.

[Via Diagnostic Imaging, thanks lmwong]

Being the 800-pound gorilla that it is in the TFT-LCD biz, we're not too shocked to hear that Samsung is quite pleased with its newfangled flat-panel digital X-ray detector. Reportedly, the creation is the "world's first" (ahem) to use thin-film transistor technology, which translates into sharper images and cost savings for the end user. Sammy claims that its new FPXD setup can produce "ultra-high definition images" to the tune of 3,072 x 3,072 pixels, and executive vice president Yun Jin-Hyuk even insinuated that this development would "help the X-ray detector market become completely digitized within a few years." Of course, we're sure that folks in this segment will indeed be thrilled to hear that "no film or development process is needed" in the new system, and better still, it should be ready to rock in Q1 of next year.

[Via Yahoo / AFP]

Philips unveiled a new ultra-high-res 256-slice CT scanner called the Brilliance iCT at the Radiological Society of North America yesterday, a unit the company says not only produces higher quality 3D images using less radiation than previous scanners, but does it far more quickly -- a full body scan takes only a minute. The speedup is achieved because the rotating X-ray element spins some 22 percent faster than other models, hitting four revolutions a second at top speed. Getting in and out of the machine that much faster also cuts radiation exposure some 80 percent from a traditional X-ray machine, and Philips says the machine is accurate enough to capture a complete image of the heart in less than two beats. Metro Health in Cleveland is the first off the line with the new gear -- check the read link for a video of it in action.