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Medspira, the innovative medical device company, announces a collaboration with Philips Healthcare to offer Medspira’s Breath Hold™ interactive breath control monitoring system as an option for Philips’ BrightView XCT SPECT/CT systems.

Developed by Mayo Clinic physicians, Breath Hold™ is a user-friendly system that enables patients to easily and consistently reproduce a breath-hold reference point to help maintain a consistent breathing pattern during imaging exams and other medical procedures. 

According to Jody Garrard, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Philips Healthcare, “A significant number of SPECT/CT studies involve the chest and abdominal organs and are often affected by respiratory motion.  Providing respiratory feedback during a CT exam has the potential to reduce motion artifacts in the CT image without compromising the SPECT/CT workflow.”

“We believe Medspira Breath Hold will help enhance SPECT/CT exams,” said Ryan Gruening, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Medspira.  “The device provides a simple, unobtrusive way for patients to use biofeedback to control their own breathing, and for the operator to know if the patient is complying with their breath hold instructions, at a relatively affordable cost for the medical facilities.  We are extremely excited about this new SPECT/CT application for our device and our partnership with such a prestigious firm as Philips Healthcare.  Breath Hold is growing rapidly in use for a full range of medical imaging procedures involving the lungs and upper abdomen.”

Breath Hold provides a way to promote predictable breath-hold and breathing patterns with greater control over respiratory motion and is non-intrusive and comfortable for patients.  The device is a significantly more cost effective alternative to traditional reactive breath control technologies.  It will enable a far greater number of sites to effectively address the problems of motion due to inconsistent patient breathing during certain imaging procedures.

Combining an expandable bellows system and pressure sensitive transducer tube, Breath Hold is wrapped around the patient’s chest or stomach and measures changes in abdominal girth due to patient respiration. For breath-hold monitoring, a reference point, typically either an inhale or exhale, is selected.  After selection, the central monitor light communicates when patients have reached their respiratory target, while additional lights visually alert them if they stray from their desired hold position.  To support a reproducible shallow respiratory pattern, patients work to keep their breathing within a central group of lights. 

Medspira makes the benefits of clinically inspired medical devices available to all healthcare professionals and their patients.

Source: Medspira