Samoa's Ministry of Health has a new $US1.5 million Computerised Tomography Scanner but it faces a shortage of qualified radiologists to use it.
Talamua Online reports there are only two qualified radiologists but one of them, Dr Glen Fatupaito, is acting Director General of Health.
The new scanner will relieve the need to send patients to New Zealand and American Samoa at great expense.
Dr Fatupaito said there's been a dramatic increase in the number of patients needing CT scans a year.
"This CT Scanner is good for basically anything like brain tumours, looking inside our internal organs and bones so it's our first line of investigation that we use 256 slices which means the number of images it can take in basically one rotation in a few seconds; so the entire scanner is over within two minutes," he explained.