HEALTH CARE : Toshiba Employees Go Back to School at $13-Million ‘Campus’

Kids and college students won’t be the only ones filing into classrooms in the next few weeks.

Engineers, service technicians and other specialists at Toshiba America Medical Systems in Tustin are heading to the company’s new training center, built at Toshiba’s Irvine Spectrum “campus.”

The $13-million training center, which opened last week, is the company’s first such facility outside Japan.

Toshiba employees from as far away as Australia and Europe will travel to Irvine to enjoy the amenities of sunny Southern California while poring over technical manuals and learning to punch the right buttons on complicated diagnostics machinery, said Toshiba spokeswoman Catherine M. Eilts.

The 28,000-square-foot training center has 16 laboratory bays, eight classrooms and a darkroom, and can accommodate 1,500 students a year, Eilts said.

Students will learn to operate, maintain and install the company’s magnetic resonance imaging systems, X-ray machines, ultrasound monitors and CT scans, or CAT scans, which create three-dimensional, computerized images of the anatomy.

Within four years, Eilts said, the training center could be open to physicians and medical technicians who purchase Toshiba machinery and use it in their offices.