z-Sharp
Siemens' flying focal spot technology. Inside the STRATON tube, an electron-beam deflection mechanism rapidly switches the focal spot between two positions offset by half a detector-slice width in the z-direction, at roughly 4608 Hz. Each rotation acquires two interleaved projection sets, effectively doubling the number of reconstructed slices from the same physical detector — SOMATOM Sensation 64, for example, generates 64 reconstructed slices from a 32-row physical UFC detector.
Why it matters to buyers: z-Sharp means a Sensation 64 or Sensation 40 is not physically a 64-row or 40-row detector system. The clinical slice count is real, but the architecture is different from GE LightSpeed VCT's 64-row native detector — oversampled in Z vs native 40 mm Z-axis coverage.
Why it matters to engineers: The electron-beam deflection circuitry is a STRATON-specific subsystem. Loss of z-Sharp capability on a Sensation manifests as reduced effective slice count and reduced Z-axis sampling; diagnosis is at the tube / deflection-electronics level.