Teardown: AMO Sovereign Phaco - Cataract Surgery Machine

In this teardown i look at a AMO Sovereign WhiteStar Phaco machine used to perform cataract surgery.

'Phaco' is a short form of Phacoemulsification which uses an ultrasonic knife to cut into the eye and chop up the damaged lens into small pieces soa new artificial lens can be inserted.

The machine i acquired was used in a local vets almost complete but with without the ultrasonic hand tools. Probably they kept them as spares for their new machine which replaced this one.

The machine is made up of a steel and aluminium chassis and the control box mounted on the top. Inside the chassis is an air pump, motorised IV pole, printer, storage tray and the along with the foot switch a few other electrical cables and power distribution.

The main controller is made from a steel outer chassis with plastic coverings. Mounted on the front is a LCD screen and control buttons. Inside the controller is a switch mode power supply, Ziatech embedded computer, phaco and diathermy power control board, parastaltic pump and valve arrangement and a SCSI solid state drive which contained the operating program.

The embedded computer is a Ziatech Z200, this uses a 80486DX4-100 CPU with 8mb RAM with several option boards; SCSI 2 Interface, Soundcard, fluidics controller and phaco controller.

A thanks and shoutout to Mike of MikesElectricStuff for tipping me off about this item which was local to me. Thanks Mike!

Teardown: Kodak CR500 Computed Radiography X-Ray Scanner

In this video i begin looking at a Kodak DirectView CR500 Computed Radiography scanner.

A computed radiography system exposes special x-ray plates in regular x-ray equipment but the image is not stored photographically. It's stored in special materials on the imaging plate.

To reveal the image stored on the plate it's digitally recovered using a CR Reader, which is what the Kodak CD500 is. The cassette is offered up the the machine where it extracts the imaging plate from the cassette, scans a red laser over the plate which makes the material fluoresce blue. The blue light is picked up using photomultiplier tubes and then digitised and processed so the image can be viewed on a computer.

The imaging plate is then exposed to bright visible light to erase it for re-use. 

Part 1: Disassembly of the main components.

Part 2: Looking closer at the main components.