CT Room Planning & Infrastructure Requirements

Your equipment supplier hands you a manual, not a building

When you order a CT scanner, the manufacturer issues a pre-installation manual: room dimensions, floor loading, power supply, heat dissipation, environmental tolerances and clearances. It is a precise, demanding document — and it is written on the assumption that somebody else will act on it.

GE HealthCare's own CT pre-installation documentation makes this explicit. It states that the customer is responsible for providing electrical materials, that the customer's structural engineer of record is responsible for floor loading along the delivery route, and it lists the roles the customer is expected to appoint — an electrical engineer, an HVAC design engineer and a structural engineer. Siemens Healthineers publishes equivalent Basic Planning Information covering room dimensioning, statics and transport.

What a CT room actually has to resolve

1. Can the scanner physically reach the room?

This is the failure that hurts most, because it surfaces last — on delivery day, with a crane booked and a gantry on a truck. The delivery route has to be surveyed end to end: gate width, driveway gradient, entrance, corridor widths, turning radii at every corner, lift dimensions and lift capacity, and door openings. Where the route is too tight, the answer is a planned temporary structural opening, craneage or skating — decided months ahead, not improvised.

2. Will the structure carry the load?

A CT gantry, table and power distribution unit impose serious point loads, and the delivery route carries transit loads that are often higher than the final resting load. In an older building without reliable drawings, that means non-destructive testing to establish what the slab and beams can actually take. Where capacity falls short, strengthening — jacketing, additional beams, slab strengthening, steel supports — usually lets you keep the premises rather than abandon it.

Floor levelness is a requirement in its own right. Manufacturers specify a levelness tolerance across the gantry and table footprint, and an existing floor should never be assumed to comply. It is measured and corrected before installation.

3. Is the electrical supply genuinely adequate?

CT systems draw a high momentary current during exposure, well above their average consumption, so sizing against an average figure is a mistake. The assessment covers incoming supply and transformer capacity, DG backup, UPS for the console and critical subsystems, cable sizing and voltage drop, isolation transformers where required, and power quality — voltage fluctuation and harmonics. RADbuild designs and fabricates the LT panels and distribution boards in-house, so the panel matches the specification rather than approximating it.

4. Earthing

Imaging equipment needs a dedicated, clean earth held within the tolerance the manufacturer states — not a tap off the building earth. This is consistently the hardest item for owners to source a competent vendor for. See our detailed guide to CT earthing requirements.

5. Radiation shielding and the lead door

Shielding is calculated for the specific room, its occupancy, and the adjacent spaces above, below and beside it, in line with AERB requirements. Walls are lead lined, viewing windows are lead glass, and the door is the part that most often fails. See our guide to lead lined doors and why they leak.

6. HVAC and heat

A CT room has a real equipment heat load and tight temperature and humidity tolerances. Drift outside those tolerances causes calibration problems and, over time, expensive failures. The design covers precision cooling selection, ducting, standby redundancy, fresh air and room pressurisation. Where a chiller or condenser is required, its platform has to be structurally designed, sited for pipe run length and vibration isolation, and left serviceable.

7. Flooring, cable routing and finishes

Imaging room flooring must meet levelling tolerance for gantry alignment and carry the equipment load, typically finished in anti-static or conductive vinyl with seamless coved edges for cleaning. Console and equipment cabling runs through cable trenches, trays or false flooring with serviceable access panels — planned before the floor is laid, not chased into it afterwards.

The planning sequence we follow

• Feasibility first. Site screening and the ingress study, before you commit to a premises or a lease
• Structural verification. Load assessment, testing where drawings are missing, strengthening design if needed
• Design. Room layout, shielding calculation, electrical scheme, HVAC design, coordination drawings issued to every trade
• Regulatory. AERB layout documentation support alongside your RSO
• Execution. Civil, shielding, lead doors, earthing, panels, HVAC, flooring and interiors
• Handover. Certified earth values, leakage survey, site-readiness checks and snag closure before the installation team arrives

Where the authoritative numbers come from

Room dimensions, weights, electrical loads and environmental tolerances are model specific, and they change between revisions. We work from the current pre-installation manual for your exact configuration, obtained through your equipment supplier's project manager. We do not republish manufacturer specifications here — those documents are the manufacturer's, and using an out-of-date figure off a website is precisely how a room gets built wrong.

Manufacturer site planning resources: GE HealthCare · Siemens Healthineers.