Automatic working time counter for ultrasound diagnostic systems

Abstract

State Health Care Accreditation Agency under the Ministry of Health instructs the health care institutions to keep the operating time records of costly medical systems. The governmental requirement to report using time of costly medical systems is mandatory from 2014. Fulfillment of this obligation have raised discussions if there are technical possibilities to account time when systems are in use. The ultrasound diagnostic systems (UDS) are that which quit frequent are used costly medical systems in hospitals. In this study we aiming to present technical possibilities of working time automatic counter dedicated for UDS. We introduce definition of using time for UDS: system is in-use when scanning of patient is being performed and ultrasound waves are sent from the array transducer (so called scan-head). There are presented the results of verification of designed and prototyped automatic counter. Verification is done with UDS SonixTouch (Ultrasonix, Canada) working with phased array (2-4MHz) transducer SA4-2. The idea of automatic counter is to detect changes of electrical power consumption. The increased power consumption in UDS is related with scanning when ultrasound waves are sent from the array transducer. Verification results confirm that individually programmed automatic counter could provide objective estimates of technical time of using of UDS with error less than 1 second. We can conclude that it is important to ensure individual programming of counter to particular imaging parameters and particular UDS.