5 Axis Tower Gantry

Nuclear Scintillation Camera

Washington State University New Veterinary Teaching Hospital

• The Nuclear Imaging head is a System 600XR manufactured by General Electric.

• The system has 91 photomultiplier tubes with a crystal size of 388mm X 508mm.

• The computer system is Starcam 4000 by GE.

• The collimator is high resolution.

• The gantry that supports and moves the head was manufactured by Motion Control Systems of Redmond, WA.

The installation is primarily used to scan horses which are secured into a platform/paddock located in front of the unit.  A handheld pendant is used to control 5 degrees of motion.  The tower bridge can move forward & back.  The tower moves left & right along the bridge.  The carriage can be raised and lowered via the ball screw which spans the vertical length of the unit.  The fork which suspends the 700 lb detector head rotates clockwise and counter clockwise and the head tilts forward and back within the fork itself.  The bridge that the tower sits on straddles a pit, allowing the scanner to be lowered and moved under the belly of the patient (see last picture).

"The installation was made very difficult because the contractors installed the dropped ceiling superstructure in the examination lab before we got the tower installed.  That resulted in having to stand the 3000 lb, 14 ft. tower up onto the moving bridge that straddled a 4 ft deep pit in a very limited space.  There was less then 5 feet of open space on each side of the pit.  Because of the dropped ceiling structure, there was only 5 feet of high ceiling space available in front of the pit.  We used 2 forklifts working in tandem to lift the unit in place, working under portable lighting.  It was a difficult installation - at one point we actually had to stack bricks up in the corner of the pit so the forklift could drive over without falling in.  I came within a skinned knuckle of taking a cutting torch to the dropped ceiling structure."

Joe Giamona - Principal, Motion Control Systems

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