Question: What would you do if the equipment wasn’t working?

Thomas Biggans answered on 15 Jun 2016:

If a piece of equipment stopped working I’d start with the obvious – turn it off and turn it back on again. Although some of these machines cost millions of pounds they do just sometimes get stuck and need to start over.

From there it depends what the problem is which we can sometimes figure out from the images the scanner produces. From the images we can spot particular hardware issues which would require an engineer to come out and replace or repair the broken part which I’ve identified.

We might find it is a software issue, the computers attached to the equipment apply alot of corrections to the data to account for physical effects and the camera itself to give us better images. Sometimes these corrections need re-calibrated which I can carry out myself following a set procedure.

There are some occasions where the equipment is working perfectly but a patient factor has caused a fault to appear. I came across one recently where part of the image was lost it appeared blank. I investigated by looking at the images and the daily test result. I found that the problem happened because the patient had rolled over by quite a bit to one side which meant the corrections I mentioned earlier didn’t work properly. Because I found this out I was able to fix the correction and recover the blank part of the image without having to scan the patient again.

In short I investigate to determine exactly what is causing the problem then I come up with a solution to the problem then I test the solution to see if it has worked.