Cedars Sinai Medical Center

The Los Angeles Planning Commission on Thursday approved the construction of a tower at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and rezoned a vacant Westwood lot so that it can become a city park. Cedars-Sinai received approval for a 200,000-square-foot expansion that will include 100 new patient beds and 700 parking spaces.

A former Cedars-Sinai Medical Center employee was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison after pleading guilty Monday to stealing patient information to defraud insurance firms of $354,000. The hospital had sent letters in December to more than 1,000 patients, warning them that their information had been found during a search of the home of James Allen Wilson, who worked in the billing department from 2003 to 2007.

The chief executive of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center said Thursday that he regretted the "circumstances" that subjected 206 patients to radiation overdoses and laid out reforms made since the hospital discovered that a CT scanner had been set erroneously for 18 months. In a written statement, Thomas M. Priselac said: "We take very seriously our responsibility for operating medical equipment in the safest possible manner, and deeply regret the circumstances that led to patients undergoing CT brain perfusion studies receiving a higher than appropriate level of radiation."

More than 200 patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center were inappropriately exposed to high doses of radiation from CT brain scans used to diagnose strokes, hospital officials told The Times on Friday. About 40% of the patients lost patches of hair as a result of the overdoses, a hospital spokesman said. Even so, the overdoses went undetected for 18 months as patients received eight times the dose normally delivered in the procedure, raising questions about why it took Cedars-Sinai so long to notice that something was wrong.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center officials said Monday that 260 patients had been exposed to high doses of radiation during CT brain scans during an 18-month period, up from the hospital's original estimate of 206 in September. A review by the hospital also found that about 20% of the patients received exposure directly to the lenses of their eyes, which puts them at a higher risk for cataracts, said Simi Singer, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles hospital. Of the newly identified cases, 47 patients had died by the time the hospital began contacting victims -- a reflection, officials said, of their serious illnesses, not the radiation exposure.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center did not tell all 206 patients who received radiation overdoses during CT scans of the hospital's error, according to the accounts of four people who said they only came to understand what happened to them through news reports. In a statement last week, hospital officials said all the patients had been contacted "in the interest of keeping them informed." But in interviews with The Times, four people said that although they were called and questioned by Cedars-Sinai radiologists last month, the doctors neither acknowledged any error nor explained that the patients had been exposed to eight times more radiation than necessary.

Every time a patient receives a CT scan, a mundane array of numbers appears on a computer screen before a technician. The numbers include the radiation dose. "It's in your face on the screen," said Dr. Donald Rucker, chief medical officer for Siemens, a manufacturer of CT scanners. Beginning in February 2008, each time a patient at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center received a CT brain perfusion scan -- a state-of-the-art procedure used to diagnose strokes -- the dose displayed would have been eight times higher than normal.