What will they think of next? More ingenuity from biomeds on the job.

In the August issue, we reported on biomeds who used their ingenuity to save their facilities money and make their environments safer. This month we present more of your ingenious colleagues and the clever ways they have solved problems.

Mike Tully is an imaging tech who has worked at Veterans Affairs hospitals over the years. While helping the St Louis VA hospital resolve imaging issues in its special procedures (angio) room, he saw that it needed a phantom capable of testing in vitro catheter image quality. Because manufactured phantoms were inadequate, colleague Paul Sherman says, Tully invented one.

“Mike’s invention was simple,” Sherman explains. “He found that Plexiglas’s optical characteristics are almost identical to [those of] the human body. By going to a plastics vendor and having 12- x 12- x 1-inch sheets cut, with smaller pieces as spacers to allow cath insertion, we could create a phantom to simulate almost any patient and depth merely by stacking sheets and spacers differently.”

Sherman, who is now at the VA’s Center for Engineering and Occupational Safety and Health, says Tully is one of the best imaging biomeds in the industry—“certainly the best I’ve met.”

Paring the PMs
Three biomeds from what used to be Brookside Hospital in San Pablo, Calif—now a Tenet Healthcare facility—developed another kind of tool, one that changed the shop’s preventive maintenance schedule and cut the number of PM work orders dramatically.

Criticality worksheet saves time and money

Jeff Shaffer, CBET, who is now at Kaiser Hospital Foundation Regional Biomedical Center in Berkeley, Calif, tells us that he and colleagues Wally Blackwood and Jeff Cohen devised a criticality worksheet. “When given the opportunity to change our PM schedule and use risk factors instead of requiring every item to be on an annual schedule, we developed this worksheet to assess each biomedical device and assigned it a numerical value. We used the result to eliminate items that did not benefit from routine service and concentrated our efforts where they did the most good. It proved to be a very useful tool in that it reduced the number of PM work orders from 1,290 to 982, and, more important, it reduced the corrective maintenance work orders from 1,326 to 920 over the course of the next year. I believe this was a source of major savings for the hospital, as it reduced breakdowns by 30%.”

Nothing Like the Real Thing
John West, CBET, diagnostic imaging engineer at Methodist Dallas Medical Center tells about a project that was actually born in the 1980s after he had seen a wooden-box–mounted stator (which was not clearly visible) built by an R.P. Kincheloe engineer for demonstration purposes. A tube was set into the box to drive the rotor upon activation of a switch.

West says, “Cool as it was (and who doesn’t like big exotic motors?), I knew someday I would have to put something together that would be a little more visible and would not wind up looking like another x-ray tube lamp.”

Lo and behold, West relates, his chance came when an x-ray tube with one lost filament caused a total panic in the hospital’s only specials room.

“I now had the first major component in my quest to build a better mousetrap (in this case, an x-ray tube demo unit). After the smoke cleared in the specials area, I now needed to marry my rotor to a suitable stator.”

West’s demo unit is now retired.

Of the three major types, West had to find the one that would fit his tube. With much help and patience, he says an employee at a tube vendor was finally able to harvest a compatible stator from a suitable donor (only the housing was damaged).

West continues, “I drew up a schematic and then proceeded to gather the hardware and electronic components (all takeouts and old leftover parts) to produce a unit that would not only turn an anode but also demonstrate the appearance of actual functionality.

“Most service engineers can easily recognize the components and remember [from what equipment they come]. It is a ‘time capsule’ of sorts. It took about 6 months to build (at work in spare time—yes it happens).”

West explains how the demo unit works: “The AC 60-cycle line voltage powers the stator to turn the rotor, anode and, with the help of a phase capacitor, [there is] enough shift between the start and run stator winding to give some acceleration (and hopefully the right direction of rotation). A doorbell XFMR powers the filament and, through a relay, the power resistor circuit will provide a soft glow (emulating standby) and a bright light upon prep. Having prepped the tube and lit the filament (cathode), and, at the same time, depressing the x-ray switch on the hand pendant, a buzzer is energized, simulating the actual production of x-ray.

“The finished unit is now retired,” West says, “and only does annual speaking engagements to wide-eyed radiology students. I believe it encapsulates the whole 1,000-words-to-a-picture equation. I have known several radiology techs and service engineers who sometimes have little visual input to support all the technology (schematics and drawings, etc) they learn. Just as for those who study to become physicians and nurses, there comes a time you have to put down Gray’s Anatomy and get a glimpse of the real thing. ”

West says he is always glad to share his information, as have the other biomeds who so generously contributed to these articles. They, too, are the real thing.