The decline offers bright spots for the coil repair market, and many companies are reporting double-digit growth over the last few years. Sales of aftermarket refurbished coils are also up. Coils can be repaired for about one-tenth their full replacement cost, so refurbished coils provide a low-cost alternative to buying new replacement components.

“Sales of coils have been steadily climbing as hospitals and imaging centers are more closely evaluating the cost of coils from the OEM versus third-party suppliers,” says Krista Kotria, marketing manager for Block Imaging International Inc.


The number of procedures performed is outpacing the number of scanners purchased making coil maintenance an even higher priority.

“When you talk about a scanner that does primarily head or neck or spine, and it goes down and they don’t have another scanner they can use, that coil becomes mission critical,” says Hersman. “You need the ability to offer a next-day solution and options to get them back up quickly.”

It was only about 10 to 15 years ago when repairing coils was a service almost any company could provide, as there were just a small number of coils produced by a handful of manufacturers.

Fast forward to today and newer coils, including phased array coils and 4- 8- and 16- channel or higher are particularly challenging to repair, requiring detailed schematics to service, and requiring a healthy knowledge of electronics, equipment cosmetics and cable interfaces.

“It is challenging from time to time. I was a good troubleshooting technician in the Air Force and find myself falling back on some experiences and coupling those with high-tech theory in order to figure some of these out,” Jones says. “The problem is, you don’t get to buy the manuals because they are made by your competitors and as technology gets more complex, moving from 4- to 8- to 16-channel systems, there is a lot of stuff packaged into that small housing. It’s densely populated, integrated circuitry and one must spend days reverse-engineering the product and creating one’s own manual.”

Down the line
From a manufacturing side, Jones says the coils parallel the MRI systems in terms of the complexities and the number of elements that are employed inside of a coil.

“An element produces a signal, and you can have 32 elements inside of a coil package, and those elements are turned on and off in groups and send signals out in 8- or 16- signal pathways for simultaneous analog traditional conversions or signal processing,” he says. “What we are seeing is, as systems migrate to the higher number of system platforms, that we have to go back and recreate coils that optimize the clinical functionality for all of the human imaging and by-parts. They need to be migrated up the chain of complexity from 4- to 8- to 16- channel coils and realize the performance improvements that one gets from doing that.”

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