The C-Trak® Surgical Guidance System from Care Wise has been designed to be used by a surgeon in identifying tissues which contain a radioisotope label. The heart of the system is a small, hand-held gamma detector, the C-Trak® probe. With this probe, the surgeon can also determine whether surgically removed tissue contains radioisotope material and, by repeated assay, can determine whether all radioisotope containing material has been removed from the operative site.
C-Trak® probes are capable of measuring gamma energies up to 364 keV, and are designed to detect small sites of radioisotope uptake in the high scatter, highly variable background environments found with imaging radiolabels such as Indium 111 and Technetium 99m. The C-Trak® Omniprobe PET can be used to detect higher-energy radiolabels such as FDG, with energies up to 600 keV.
Achieving this level of performance is possible because of the probe's proprietary combination of variable collimation and shielding, coupled to the signal discrimination of the C-Trak® analyzer.
Patented, snap-on collimators vary the probe's field of view from wide (for surveying) to narrow (for probe-guided resection), and can be matched to suit tissue/background levels. The use of the patented C-Trak® blocking plate, in combination with the collimators, allows the surgeon to reduce radiation from outside the selected field of view.
Note (added Dec 4th 2009): The FDA's Medwatch publication service has issued a statement that the STERIS SS1 process has recently been significantly modified, and that the new process is not approved or cleared for sterilization. Anyone using the STERIS SS1 process should contact the STERIS Corporation to learn whether this issue affects them. Care Wise Medical Products Corporation does not recommend the use of the new STERIS SS1 process to sterilize C-Trak® products until the process has been approved and cleared by the FDA.
