Terason t3000? Seen it! Only this time it's called the Acuson P50.
The Terason t3000 next to the Acuson P50 (right)
Walking the floor at RSNA, I stumbled across a company I'd seen in the past, but not paid a whole lot of attention to. The company is called Terason, and about 6 months ago, it released (albeit quietly) the MacBook Pro-based Terason t3000 ultrasound system.
So at RSNA, after being quite impressed by Acuson's new product, I later found the Acuson P50 on display at another vendor's booth... only this time it was called a Terason t3000. Come to find out, this product has been around for a bit of time and Siemens has taken it and branded it as its own product.
Back in August I saw an FDA approval that, at the time, didn't make any sense to me. It was from Siemens and it announced the Acuson P50, which it states "The Acuson P50 (TM) Ultrasound System is identical to the Teratech 2000 and previous Teratech models as identified in the predicate device section" ... with the exception of some new probes. As it turns out, this Siemens/Acuson is a re-branded Terason product (a darn nice product at that).
Shocked? Me too, I guess. They've pretty much dropped the ball on this market, failing to build on the Cypress, and now they have a nice product to offer. Lately, industry insiders are all disappointed (worldwide) with Siemens' slow reaction to the ultrasound market. The general feeling is that ultrasound is just a throw-in for their CT and MR products to sweeten a deal... which must be why Siemens fell asleep at the wheel when it comes to innovation and are boasting this MacBook Pro system as its own, excellent innovation. And it's important to note how they're back to branding their ultrasound products as "ACUSON", not Siemens, after they all-but-tried-to-kill the Acuson brand and make it their own. Oops.
But back to the real story here: you shouldn't think that this Acuson P50 is a lesser product, even if you've never heard of Terason (from whom you can buy this same product with different probes). This Terason unit is quite impressive and fully shared service t3000 (Siemens advertises the P50 as a C/V unit only). The Terason folks are good people and they made a product good enough for one of the Big Three to name it their own. Not bad.
I spent some time with the Terason folks at their RSNA booth and they're good people... friendly, knowledgeable and extremely enthusiastic about their systems. They don't advertise the re-branding and, come to think of it, they didn't say much about it when I talked about the P50 and t3000. They're excited about their product and were really enthusiastic about showing the benefits of the Macintosh operating system underneath... something the Siemens reps were not prepared to do (they didn't even know that it was actually running Windows XP and that you had to get out of it to see a Mac interface.... so I think the sales reps were quite surprised as well).
All in all, both products are quite cool. The Terason comes with a 2-year warranty and has the shared services capabilities. If you're interested in this unit, you can drop me an email and I'll put you in touch with one of the sales reps there.
Recent Comments