Bermuda could soon have two state of the art CT scanners.

The first scanner, which costs in the region of $1.5 million, was unveiled at the Premier's Brown-Darrell Clinic on Tuesday evening.

Another has been purchased by the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital and is expected to be operating within a month.

Premier Dr. Ewart Brown debuted the Siemens Somatom Sensation 64-Slice CT scanner to invited guests at the newly-opened clinic at Winterhaven on South Road.

The clinic will be an an adult stem cell clinic, though no mention of stem cells was made at Tuesday evening's event. The Brown-Darrell Clinic is owned by the Premier, his wife Wanda and the California-based Stemedica company.

A CT Scanner is a large, technically advanced x-ray machine. It is used to diagnose a variety of diseases and allow doctors to inspect the inside of the body without having to operate or perform intrusive examinations.

Prior to Dr. Brown's clinic, Bermudians would have had to fly abroad in order to undergo diagnostic testing that was beyond the capability of King Edward VII Memorial Hospital's to current CT Scan. Now they will have the option to have it done on the Island.

Guests at the event were told the new scanner would allow people to be diagnosed earlier and would save insurance companies money.

Previously insurance companies picked up the tab for patients travelling abroad to be tested. This included airfare, hotel and the costs for testing. Now, patients can go to Brown-Darrell and get results as early as 5 p.m. the same day of scanning.

The Bermuda Hospitals Board was contacted yesterday and told The Royal Gazette they too were investing in a new scanner, though it would not be as advanced as the one in the Brown-Darrell Clinic.

Currently it has a 1-slice CT scanner, but that will be upgraded to an 8-slice CT scanner within the next month.

The spokesperson said: "The 8-slice CT scanner is an excellent replacement and will provide a faster CT diagnostic test for patients and vastly improve quality. Our CT equipment is a critical service for many people who require an internal scan, for example of the brain and especially for our emergency department."

She added that there was not much difference between the 64-slice scanner and the 8-slice scanner apart from the fact that the 64-slice scanner was faster and therefore better suited for tests such as cardiac CT angiography.

It is not known how much an 8-slice scanner costs.

On Tuesday evening invited guests, from the medical and insurance fields, began the evening with cocktails at the Tucker's Point Club and were shuttled to the Brown-Darrell clinic just five minutes away.

As the guests arrived, Dr. Brown said he remembered running across the same property barefoot when he was a boy.

"We called this the haunted house," he said.

"I said one day I'd like to own the haunted house and now it is the clinic."