Business

Camden Clark Medical Center renovates operating room

PARKERSBURG -- A newly renovated operating room at the WVU Medicine Camden Clark Medical Center will expand endovascular care provided by the hospital.

The hospital recently completed a $1 million renovation to an operating room, turning it into a state-of-the-art hybrid endovascular facility, officials said.

"What we have done in the last few months is provide an update with a whole new generation of equipment," said Dr. Dan McGraw, vascular surgeon and the medical director of the Camden Clark Physicians Corps. "What is neat about this room is it is the most expensive square feet in the hospital because you have a cath lab inside an operating room."

A combination of equipment, computing power, state-of-the-art imaging equipment and scanners in a sterile environment allows the hospital to do a variety of things.

"Why that is important is that it allows us to attack a variety of vascular problems with a combination of opening and endovascular procedures," McGraw said. "If we were just in a cath lab, all you could do is something that is catheter-based. In the operating room you don't have the imaging that is nearly good enough to do the advance procedures we want to do on the aorta. This room brings all of that together. We have a sterile operating room environment to take care of just about any problem we can confront."

The new operating room utilizes the GE Innova IGS 540, which provides extensive body coverage for peripheral and abdominal procedures. It provides superior image quality, excellent anatomical coverage, and an all-in-one large display monitor, officials said.

The operating table is fully motorized to be able to position the patient. The flat panel detector can translate the widest range of X-ray exposure intensities into digital signals without saturation, officials said. The DRM image processing transforms the information for display without a loss of detail over a wide range of anatomical densities, they said.

Being in a sterile environment, the hospital is able to make incisions on a patient.

Before, medical personnel could take a C-Arm, a portable radiology unit, into a regular operating room, but it did not provide the imaging they can now achieve in the new operating room, McGraw said.

The new equipment also uses a lot less radiation.

"We are able to get great images without exposing the patient or our staff to more radiation than we have to," McGraw said.

The new equipment also allows them to be able to import images that have been produced on the CT scanner in another hospital and put them in system in the suite.

"With the patient on the table, we can overlay those images with a live patient," McGraw said. "It has tremendous benefits in saving the patient from a lot of radiation exposure. It provides the best of all worlds with imaging. The difference between the old system and this is night and day."

There is a lot of computing power available in the new operating room.

"There is nothing like this in the rest of the Mid-Ohio Valley," McGraw said. "It is a very unique facility. This type of investment speaks to Camden's commitment to first-rate vascular surgery care in the community."

The Mid-Ohio Valley has a sizable population at risk for vascular disease with rampant smoking, diabetes and high cholesterol, officials said.

"There are a lot of patients who have vascular problems," McGraw said. "It is a very common problem here."

With the image intensifier they can do aorta undergraphs.

"We can see everything in one shot with it," McGraw said. "The other neat thing with this is it can do imaging where you spin the intensifier around the patient and create an almost virtual CT scan of the vessel which was present before and is better now."

The new operating room is ideal for treating patients with aneurysms and allows personnel to image a patient from the lower chest to the groin in one shot, officials said.

"We can reconstruct the aorta from the inside with covered stents," McGraw said. "We can stent various arteries throughout the body, these are arteries to the kidney, renal arteries that develop blockages and more.

"The most common thing will be treating patients with arterial blockages in the legs. They have trouble walking far because they have poor blood supply in the legs or they have gone on to develop ulcers in their legs, ulcers that won't heal. This is the ideal platform for treating that patient."

With all of the technology available, it still comes down to those who are providing the care, from the nurses to the techs to the surgical assistants, the doctors, officials said.

"The best part is we have a very experienced crew that is dedicated to working in vascular surgery and they are really what enables us to get the full value for the patient out of this room," McGraw said. "It is a tremendous team."

The new operating room is on par with anything found in a large academic hospital that is larger than Camden Clark, he said.

"This operating room was built specifically for vascular surgery," McGraw said.