Report: CT replacement purchases slow down, procedures continue to grow
An estimated 68.7 million CT procedures were performed in 7,640 hospital and non-hospital sites in 2007, despite shrinking CT capital budgets, according to a recent U.S. census of CT sites by IMV Medical Information Division.

This represents an average annual growth rate of about 8 percent since 2003, when an estimated 50.1 million procedures were performed, IMV said.

Lorna Young, senior director, market research, IMV, said that while the number of CT procedures performed is continuing to grow steadily, it appears that CT capital budgets for 2008 are smaller than in prior years, indicating a slowing down of actual purchase activity for replacement and additional units.

“From 2000 to 2008, the proportion of CT sites having zero dollars budgeted for CT scanners increased from 51 percent to 83 percent. Based on an installed base of over 10,000 CT units and an average replacement cycle of seven years, there is a large installed base that could be replacing their units at an average rate of over 1,400 units per year,” Young said. “However, the proportion of sites actually budgeting for replacement units is slowing. Over the last five years, CT sales were largely driven by sites acquiring multi-slice CT units, as the number of multi-slice CTs grew from 27 percent of the 2002 installed base to 81 percent of the current CT installed base. It appears that purchase activity has slowed, as CT sites focus on the efficient utilization of their CT equipment.”

IMV's 2007 CT Market Summary Report describes trends in procedure utilization, the CT installed base and purchase plans, workstations, power injectors, contrast media utilization and budgets, and site operations characteristics. The report also covers adoption trends of new procedures such as CT angiography and advanced technologies including 64-slice CTs.

Highlights include:
  • CT angiography procedures are performed by two-thirds of the CT sites.
  • Two-thirds of the CT procedures performed in 2007 used contrast media, including injectable and oral contrast.
  • Over half of the CTs installed in 2007 were multi-slice CTs with 64+ slices.
  • The large amount of data from volumetric scanning places increased demand on processing the data. Two-thirds of the CT sites use workstations for processing and displaying CT images, with 3D software as an essential capability.
  • The data source for this report is IMV’s 2006/07 CT Census Database, which provides comprehensive profiles of hospital and non-hospital CT sites in the United States.
  • The database can be licensed by qualified subscribers and includes contact and site-specific information.
  • Applications of the database include market analysis, market development, target marketing, lead generation, installed base marketing programs, sales territory deployment and competitive analysis.
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