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Simply put, we have the best technology

Our Aquilion ONE 640 slice CT scanner has significant advantages over other conventional CT scanners:

It is the WORLD’S most powerful and advanced scanner– 640 slices vs. the 64 slice machines which are generally currently regarded as ‘state of the art’. Learn more
It is the ONLY scanner able to image entire organs, including the heart, in one rotation (0.35 seconds) giving increased accuracy
It has the HIGHEST spatial resolution of any scanner – 0.3mm (vs. >0.5mm for 64 slice scanners) also increasing its accuracy
It delivers the LOWEST radiation dose of any multi-detector scanner. Learn more
It is the ONLY scanner able to accurately image and quantify the vulnerable soft cholesterol-rich plaques ('furring-up') of the coronary arteries, which is the most likely to rupture and cause a heart attack
It is the ONLY scanner allowing dynamic imaging of moving joints
The open scanner reduces claustrophobia – in the majority of cases patients are positioned ‘feet first’ rather than ‘head first’ thereby keeping the patients head out of the bore of the scanner
It is very quiet

In addition to the Aquilion ONE scanner, the ESC also utilises a different type of CT scanner, the Electron Beam CT (EBCT) scanner. This uses an electron beam to produce a focused arc of x-rays which are particularly good at imaging the heart (heart scan) to detect any calcium (chalk) within the heart arteries. As calcium is only deposited in the heart arteries as part of the ‘furring up’ process (atherosclerosis), numerous studies have demonstrated that its measurement provides an accurate assessment of the overall amount of ‘furring up’ and risk of a heart attack.

A CT scanner consists of an x-ray tube that rotates at high speed around the body, generating x-rays which are variably absorbed by the different tissues in the body. These x-ray beams produce thousands of cross-sectional images of your body which are then amalgamated by a computer to produce incredibly detailed, static or moving, three dimensional pictures that can be viewed from any angle. The quality of these images and the amount of radiation that is required to generate them depends largely on the number of image slices that can be generated from each rotation of the x-ray tube. While most NHS hospitals use scanners of between 16 and 64 slices, the ESC has recently installed a scanner generating 640 slices. This scanner, the Toshiba Aquilion ONE scanner, is the most advanced CT scanner available anywhere in the world and the ESC is the only independent centre in the UK to acquire this scanner.