Siemens Medical Solutions has expanded its Somatom Definition dual-source CT system with the addition of the AS model, which will be offered in 40-, 64-, and 128-slice configurations.

This past week, Siemens demonstrated its first installation of the system at Erlangen University Hospital in Erlangen, Germany. Peter Kingma, vice president of Siemens CT division told Health Imaging News, “it ran well, and we showed a number of clinical cases on the system.”

Siemens reported that the Definition AS features a large-volume coverage area capable of a 200-cm scan range, a 78-cm gantry bore and the capability to add a high-capacity 650-lb patient table. Kingma said these specifications allow the scanner to be utilized for a wide range of cases, from morbidly obese patient studies to pediatric exams.

Kingma said that the system has “general flexibility — it has enough bandwidth and headroom that you can put in anywhere in a hospital and can be used with any number of cases.” In addition, the scanner has a “very fast rotation (300ms), and a 150ms temporal resolution.”

He believes that the Somatom Definition AS is “ideally suited for interventional, cardiac imaging, gastrointestinal and large area percussion studies.” In the area of cardiac imaging, Kingma said that the scanner has the capability “to capture the heart in a single rotation, and provides increased coverage of the organ.”

He added that Siemens designed the new the system to be “specifically geared to reducing the radiation dosage to the patient for a good clinical outcome.”

The Somatom Definition AS has not yet received clearance from the FDA for utilization in the United States.