Updated at 8:40 a.m., Saturday, January 20, 2007
High-tech machines on display today at Maui Memorial
Advertiser Staff
WAILUKU, MAUI — Maui Memorial Medical Center is hosting an open house from 9 a.m. to noon today to showcase its new Axiom Artis DynaCT system, which allows physicians and technicians to view images of the brain and other areas of the body in rotating 3-D graphics.
The $2.5 million system installed at the hospital's Heart, Brain & Vascular Center is the only one of its kind in Hawai'i, according to Maui Memorial officials.
Its eight flat-screen monitors provide high-definition images that allow doctors to treat patients though endovascular techniques, using the blood vessels instead of invasive surgery. Employing the new imaging system, doctors already have treated two brain aneurysms that otherwise would have been inoperable; dissolved a blood clot in a man's brain, reversing stroke symptoms; and saved a woman and her fetus from severe hemorrhaging.
The system also can be used to treat the liver, kidney and other organs, and allows radiologists to deliver therapies directly to tumors.
Maui Memorial also recently purchased a $450,000 Philips Eclipse VIA5.0 SENSE Accelerator Upgrade to advance its the capabilities of its magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, equipment.
Today's open house will feature speakers in the hospital auditorium and tours of the Heart, Brain & Vascular Center.
