Enhanced Imaging Agrees to Purchase : Acquisition: The Irvine firm will buy most of PPG Industries’ biomedical systems division.

Enhanced Imaging Technologies Inc. has agreed to buy most of the biomedical systems division of PPG Industries Inc.

The deal would increase the Orange County company’s payroll nearly fivefold, quadruple its sales and could result in the shuffling of employees among facilities in Southern California and Kentucky.

Enhanced Imaging has agreed to pay a total of $55 million in cash, a note and some stock in one of its subsidiaries.

The new operations are expected to add more than $150 million to Enhanced Imaging’s $50 million in annual sales and will require a major effort at the Irvine-based medical imaging firm to absorb and integrate the new units, said company Vice President Bob Quinn.

Enhanced Imaging would gain PPG’s cardiac catheterization laboratory and its 400 employees in Lenexa, Kan., as well as its Freiburg, Germany-based imaging business, Hellige. After selling off parts of the German business at the time the purchase closes, which is expected by March 31, Enhanced Imaging would gain 550 employees in Europe, Quinn said.

Enhanced Imaging now has 250 employees, including 100 in Orange County and 65 in Torrance. The acquisition will bring total employment to about 1,200, including 650 in the United States.

Not included in the proposed transaction is PPG’s blood gas sensor business in La Jolla. PPG is negotiating to sell that start-up research business to a different buyer.

Quinn said the acquisition will propel Enhanced Imaging far beyond its current business and make it a full-line, international supplier of cardiac catheterization products. In addition to its German operations, Hellige has sales offices in Austria, England, France and Italy.

The PPG companies manufacture a variety of catheter monitoring and hemodialysis equipment. Quinn said the products will compliment Enhanced Imaging’s lines of medical imaging films and digital imaging products used in a cardiac catheter lab. Enhanced Imaging also sells components to the manufacturers of radiology and ultrasound devices.

“We are getting all of this monitoring and hemodialysis business that is in our same market--the cath lab market,” Quinn said. “Getting it all to work together will be our big challenge for 1994.”

That could mean transfers of staff and operating functions among the company’s Irvine and Torrance facilities and the new and larger facility in Kansas that comes with its purchase of PPG’s catheter laboratory, called E for M.e

Enhanced Imaging officials have not made any decisions about personnel or production shifts, and could as easily move things to Southern California from Kansas as it could to Kansas from Irvine and Torrance.

“We will always have a strong presence in Southern California,” Quinn said.

Pittsburgh-based PPG, a maker of chemicals, coatings, resins and glass, said it will take a pretax charge of $30 million against its fourth-quarter earnings for the sale.

PPG assembled most of its biomedical systems division in 1986 through acquisitions from Litton Industries and Honeywell Inc.

Investors greeted word of the acquisition Wednesday by pushing up the price of both companies’ stock.

PPG shares closed at $75.50 in moderate trading on the New York Stock Exchange, up $1.75 for the day; Enhanced Imaging shares, traded in the Nasdaq market, closed at $4, up 25 cents for the day after rising to a high of $4.50 a share.