On the road: Mobile CT scanner set to transform rural healthcare

Monash researcher Dr Nyein Chan Aung is, at the end of the day, an inventor. He makes things that are intended to be useful for as many people as possible. He’s like one of those inventors from the movies – driven and perhaps a little crazy, extremely clever and full of good ideas. He says his job is to “make cool stuff”.

Dr Aung works in Monash University’s Design Health Collab in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, where he’s the program director of imaging technology design research. His PhD is in industrial design, and he says he’s “an artist at heart”.

Five years ago, in Lens, we told the story of an idea for palliative care, inspired by his own experiences in a hospital room with a loved one. He painted striking watercolours in the room and made sketches of how the room could be more comfortable and practical. The patient, Julia (his wife’s mother and a childhood teacher), had suffered a stroke from which she wouldn’t recover.  

Now, Dr Aung is deep into a project which looks set to revolutionise radiology. He and his team are working on world-first mobile CT scanners for rural communities in the United States, who may have poor access to medical equipment.

The research partnership is made up of Dr Aung’s Monash team, Australian tech company Micro-X, which has figured out ways to make CT scanners much, much smaller, and Johns Hopkins University in the US.

They have a new $A25 million contract to begin developing the prototypes from the US Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as part of their Platform Accelerating Rural Access to Distributed and InteGrated Medical care (PARADIGM) initiative.

The trick is the size. Micro-X, headquartered in Adelaide, has made nano electronic X-ray (NEX) technology that uses miniaturised X-ray emitters to deliver high-quality, three-dimensional imaging comparable to hospital-based systems.

The mobile CT scanners for America weigh only 225 kilograms. A conventional hospital scanner weighs 2000 kilograms.

“It’s American funding at this stage,” he says, “but I want to be very direct. While there's no program funding it for similar communities in Australia at the moment, Monash University and Design Health Collab are prepared to apply everything we learned and apply it to an Australian context. We’re actively looking for discussions and opportunities.”

The CT scanners will be integrated into a vehicle, eliminating the need for a hospital-based scan. This allows the equipment to reach the patient, enabling faster diagnosis and broader accessibility.

Dr Aung says “when the world gets tough”, as it is now, he gets more creative and more driven to make helpful things; his “focus” and “principles” come to the surface.

“We are laser-focused on improving healthcare for everybody, and while there's an opportunity to do that, we're going to focus on that.

“A lot of people don't know that two-thirds of the world don’t have access to advanced imaging technologies at all. In some of these areas there are fewer than one radiologist per a million people.

“As a result, cancer, stroke, and trauma diagnoses are often severely delayed. There's a real need, and a potential, for entirely new product service systems. Not just different scanners, but different ways they're delivered and different ways that they come together.”

Dr Aung began all this by designing camping gear for Oztent Australia – a camping gear company – about 15 years ago. It sounds random to go from camping gear design to medtech, but it was the best training ground for designing large “deployable” things, he explains.

Dr Aung was awarded his PhD in industrial design at Monash through a scholarship from TEAGUE, a global leader in aerospace design, in collaboration with Boeing. His patented design, developed to improve passenger sleep, is now part of the permanent collection at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

He’s also designed a Melbourne tram with an interpretation of The Last Supper, peopled by customers at Melbourne laneway institution the Supper Inn.

Then came the link with Micro-X, which led to development contracts through Monash into US government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, plus other technology partners.

In development is an airport security screening module where passengers control screening for both themselves and their bags – “a self-screening airport checkpoint”, he says, “where you have your own CT scanner, not a conveyor belt”.

The partnership is also making highly mobile, miniaturised CT scanners for the brain, in ambulances (road and air), for early stroke diagnosis – which reminds Dr Aung of Julia – and the hospital room. Micro-X has been able to stabilise carbon nanotubes to be used as an X-ray emitter about the size of two golf balls.

“X-ray works like this,” explains Dr Aung. “We heat up a cathode, which excites electrons. These electrons are then accelerated and fired at a target called the anode. When they hit the anode, their sudden deceleration causes energy to be released in the form of X-rays.

“But this whole mechanism is currently very big. It's the size of a small water-heater pipe. The X-ray emitter alone is 18 kilograms. It's a huge thing.

“But because we now have these tiny tubes, the scanner weighs one-seventh of conventional CT scanners and uses only one-third of the radiation.” Once the patient is in the ambulance with their head positioned in the stowable scanner, it can capture a brain scan for a specialist in about just four seconds.

This is, mostly, how the mobile CT scanner for America works as well, except the idea is for it to be full body. Micro-X, Monash University and Johns Hopkins are one of 12 teams collaborating on various aspects of the initiative, which includes advanced imaging and diagnostics, secure data integration, vehicle design and more.

“The challenge has been integrating a CT into a mobile platform, a mobile hospital,” Dr Aung says. “It aims to address the shortage of medical facilities in rural USA by creating a scalable vehicle hospital that's capable of providing 75% of what a hospital is able to.

“It’s not an ambulance. It's an advanced medical service vehicle, and the heart of it is the CT scanner.”

Size, weight, and logistics are no longer an issue

“Imaging is the final frontier for medtech miniaturisation, and this is a major leap forward. We’re not just building a CT room – we’re integrating a CT into a mobile hospital. The challenge is designing something that remains invisible until it’s needed, yet instantly available the moment it is.

“We’re designing a device with portability at its core – low power requirements and rapid activation will enhance both usability and readiness.”

The CT scanner is expected to be completed and ready for implementation by 2029.

Monash University’s Professor Daphne Flynn, director of Design Health Collab, says the team is focused on designing healthcare solutions “that extend distributed healthcare beyond hospital walls”.

“This project demonstrates Monash University’s place on the world stage in innovation and design, and we’re proud to be working with our partners to create more accessible health outcomes across the world,” she said.