SMC – Swiss Medical Care Sa, CEO Larry Minix Accepts The Prestigious Medical Design Excellence Award For SMC’s “CT Exprés Advanced Contrast Media Delivery System” At the MD & M East Congress In New York City.

(June 16, 2004)

The CT Exprés advanced contrast media delivery system, manufactured by Swiss Medical Care, SA (Lausanne, Switzerland), was designed to handle contrast media used for computed tomography. It provides multi-dosing and programmable saline flushing for applications in both the public and private imaging markets.

“This device answers a problem a lot of people have,” said juror Dale Bevington, cofounder of Product Innovation Partners (London). “The achievement is a large-scale bottle to hold the dyes with a disposable area. You can run the device all day long without having to flush it.”

“To prove a high level of clinical hygiene, the CT Exprés was tested under representative conditions and with viruses—instead of having only bacteria—used for simulating micro-contaminations risks in daily use,” explained Larry Minix, CEO of Swiss Medical Care. “Knowing that some customers try to reuse disposable products, the system was designed to eliminate the possibility of doing so. The safety disposables are designed so that reuse is excluded. Software routines help control the proper use of disposables.”

Minix said that the time-consuming manual handling of preparing an injection (e.g., filling disposable syringes) is no longer an issue with the CT Exprés. “The radiographer can focus more on the patient and, by saving time, the patient throughput can be increased. The waste of contrast can be reduced because the contrast is directly injected from the bottle through the safety disposables,” said Minix.
Minix said that previous attempts by others to develop peristaltic systems have been unsuccessful because they were not able to achieve guaranteed parameters such as flow rates.

“The device is a patient-by-patient disposable, so there is no problem with a syringe,” noted Bevington. “It’s a good idea for sorting out a real problem. It stops air before injection stops, and it has an incredibly fast injector.” The real improvement, he said, is that it is “fundamentally different from a syringe” for dispensing dyes for scans.

“This solves an old problem in a new way by getting rid of injector syringes,” said Wilcox. “It allows for the contrast container to be mounted directly to the machine. To my knowledge, this hasn’t been done before.”

SMC – Swiss Medical Care SA Le Portique, Av. De Sévelin 28 CH 1004 Lausanne Switzerland Tel: +41 21 623 60 30 Fax: +41 21 623 60 31 Web: www.swissmedcare.com Email: info@swissmedcare.com