Yesterday we noted Thermacore’s new white paper, “Thermal Management for Today’s Medical Devices and Equipment“. As we noted yesterday, we couldn’t agree more with Thermacore’s premise. Here at ATS, our team thinks the topic of proper thermal management of medical equipment is vitally important to people’s lives. So important, we wanted to post a bit more about it.
Key trends we are seeing in thermal development in the medical industry:
- Unquestioned Reliability
- Instruments with greater accuracy and capability
- Reduced size and miniaturization
Reliability is important on at least two levels. First, if the equipment is not reliable, the economic payback simply won’t be there for a physician, clinic or hospital. For example, CT scanner’s can cost up to $300,000. If it’s unreliable due to thermal stress, the payback investment might be twice as long as what would generally be seen.
The second reason for reliability is for patient and doctor confidence. Patients want to have confidence in the equipment they are being tested on. This can reduce their personal stress by trusting the results they will receive are accurate. Doctor’s want to be confident in the diagnostic equipment they are using. Doctor’s want to trust the data they get is accurate enough for them to determine a diagnosis.
The accuracy and diagnostic capability is important too. For any medical equipment to be useful the data collected has to be accurate or else a wrong diagnosis might occur.
The fallout from that reduced accuracy can be devastating as incorrect diagnosis may be formed leading to an incorrect course of healing for the patient. Poor thermal management of key components and entire systems can cause processors within the medical equpiment to overheat, slowdown and potentially return data errors.
Finally, reduced size and miniaturization can mean diagnostic equipment gets deployed more widely increasing it’s potential use and benefitting the health of the population where it is used. The packaging for this smaller equipment requires careful attention to the thermal design. Regardless of how low power the components used, the smaller the space, the more the airflow will be reduced and the increased likelihood for thermal stress and component malfunction.
Thermal management of electronics is critical to their functioning properly and being a tool that helps people’s health. At ATS, we have developed thermal management solutions, including heat sinks, for a variety of medical applications from EKG machines, to Defibrillators, to Ultrasound equipment and Tissue/DNA Analyzation instruments. To learn more about our thermal management consulting for medical equipment, please visit our web site at this link: ATS Thermal Management of Medical Applications. You can also drop us a line to tell us about your application and how we might help by clicking to our on-line engineering services request at our web site: Analysis and Design Services Request
From time to time ATS engineers are asked if maxiGRIP, our patented heat sink attach technology that allow phase change interface material to be properly used, can resist high heat.