Eurocolumbus

Eurocolumbus was born in 1972; during 2004 it was the first Italian company to equip its C-arms with Flat Panel Detectors (then produced and marketed by VARIAN, now named VAREX); this generated a very rapid technological growth. In the following years the final product was totally updated and renewed while following the original project, which was based on an isocentric and motorized C-arm, very safe thanks to the anti-collision sensors and a generator separated from the X-Ray tube.

Eurocolumbus is the only Italian manufacturer of C-arms that can boast a real internal R&D department. The equipments are entirely designed and built in the Milan factory (Italy). Since 2016 Eurocolumbus has been part of an important industrial group that boasts 23 research centers and 75,000 employees worldwide; this significantly increases the guarantee of continuity of the Company on its way to the continuous search for innovation and eco-sustainable quality.

Eurocolumbus was the first Italian company to use the new EtherCAT technology, by far the fastest Ethernet technology. EtherCAT allows synchronization times with magnitude of nanoseconds. The use of EtherCAT technology brings significant benefits in terms of speed and reliability to all the Applications developed and therefore installed on the systems. The efficiency of the Applications increases thanks to the reduction of waiting times in the transitions between the various phases of the processes.

The heart of the machine is the Artificial Intelligence System (MCP) which constantly monitors all functions. This new technology, first applied by Eurocolumbus in the medical world, allows to obtain perfect, fast and easily implementable systems.

The big turning point was during 2012 ! Eurocolumbus abandoned the Windows O.S. and switched to LINUX, the true real time O.S.. Fly5, the software developed under LINUX by Eurocolumbus R&D, is able to process radiological images with a maximum resolution of 3k x 3k in real time. All the images are acquired, processed and stored in 16 bits, taking profit of best technologies available on the market.

In order to guarantee full compliance with clinical requirements and not to create artifacts, no digital compression is performed on the images. In order to obtain unprecedented image quality, the Fly5 software optimizes a whole series of processes, first of all the management of the detector, which is done directly by Fly5 without using the manufacturer’s interface.

The heart of the algorithm consists in a Multi-Scale analysis with pyramidal decomposition of the images, based on the representation in terms of wavelet, then waves confined both in space and in spatial frequency. The RAW image obtained by the detector undergoes a series of filtering and sub-sampling that allow to extract and separate the different levels of information of the image according to a Gaussian-Laplacian decomposition.