Technicare

Technicare, formerly known as Ohio Nuclear, made CT, DR and MRI scanners and other medical imaging equipment.

The company did not do well under Johnson & Johnson and in 1986, under economic pressure following unrelated losses from two Tylenol product tampering cases, J&J folded the company, selling the intellectual property and profitable service business to General Electric, a competitor.

The following information is copied from a Technicare advertising brochure, which primarily focuses on Nuclear Medicine products.

Introduced DeltaScan, a high resolution (256 x 256) matrix whole body computed tomography scanner.

In that technique a series of X-ray exposures made from different angles around the body are combined by computer to present a cross-sectional picture on the screen of a cathode-ray tube.

The white areas are bone; below the center is the spinal column, and around the lungs are sections through the ribs.

The picture was made (by the Delta Scanner built by Ohio-Nuclear, Inc.) in the course of a study that was conducted by Ralph J. Alfidi, M.D.

This was followed with the head only dual slice Delta 25 which competed with the EMI Mark-I, the world's first CT scanner.

[1] One of the features of this family of scanners was the elimination of the "water bag" that EMI used through the use of a beam hardening correction to produce a uniform field.

One of the 2020 systems was operate at Brigham and Women's Hospital attempting cardiac gated imaging.

The company also marketed an MRI (called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, or NMR at the time) unit, the Teslacon, beginning in 1984.

David Flugan and Robert Gauss were the chief thinkers and the 'brain trust' behind the implementation of Technicare's MRI product line.