C-arm expertise

[peytonm]

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I work with a group of hospital employed rad techs. Some are decent, some are not great, and some are 30 yrs in and I still have to tell them which way to oblique for a MBB.

Regardless of tech, we sometimes run into poor imaging (near the lungs for SCS trial occasionally, cervical, etc). We adjusted kVp recently after trying other steps.

My question is to see if you guys have resources or tips for managing these situations. I would love to have the rad tech just take care of it, but that's not an option. I would like to develop more expertise in the nuts and bolts of c-arm fluoro to be able to tell my tech what to do to improve our image quality.

Also - do you feel like the monitor of the c-arm (not the c-arm itself, just the monitor) contributes much to image quality? I didn't know if upgrading this component alone would help seeing the image.

Thank you.

 

[lobelsteve]

Ask nicely first.
Ask loudly second.
Ask louder with eye roll third.
Yell fourth.
Squirt them with lidocaine fifth.
Kick them out and move machine yourself then reglove.
I've done 20 min kyphoplasty that took an hour due to bad tech. When the case was over the rep gave me a hug and told me that was an amazing job. I was like, what do you mean....He said it was amazing a tolerated the tech and didn't throw them out of the OR.

 

[Ducttape]

do you feel like the monitor of the c-arm (not the c-arm itself, just the monitor) contributes much to image quality? I didn't know if upgrading this component alone would help seeing the image.

if nothing else, you can teach them to collimate at all times, which is one of the best simple tools to better image quality. once they get in to the habit, if you ask for it all the time, it will become second nature.

there is no way that the image quality on your monitor is worse than the one i am currently using, and collimation will drastically improve image quality (and reduce radiation from scatter) if you are not doing so.

oh and get skinny patients....... 😛

 

[bulewold]

Have you figured this out already? What type of C-Arm are you using currently? Wondering if the system has limited kV / mA?