From the September 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


But last year, an unusual event occurred at the facility.

“A spontaneous quench of one of our MRI systems occurred during the night,” says Pasciak. “During a quench of a super-conducting MRI system, all of the liquid helium inside the scanner is boiled off in a matter of seconds and released to the outside through a pipe in the scan-room ceiling.”


After this incident, although UT Medical Center quickly identified and corrected the source of the problem, they struggled to acquire the 200 liters of helium necessary to get the scanner back online. Such a large quantity of liquid helium was not available in Tennessee, and had to be shipped from Texas. Consequently, the scanner was down for several days.

Zero-loss MRI systems like this have been available on the market for the past seven years, but industry experts believe helium shortages will be significant enough to drive the sale of newer, even more efficient MRIs.

So-called zero boil off magnets go back to 2004, when Siemens introduced the MAGNETOM Avanto 1.5T. A zero boil-off magnet works through the cold-head, which controls the liquid helium from being lost by actually condensing it back into a liquid as it turns into a gas and letting it drop back into the magnet.

In addition, the advanced MRI scanners are cheaper. The cost to maintain the magnet side to keep an older system like a GES3 cold, compared to a new Avanto, might mean a difference of $25,000 per year – that’s also one-fifth the cost of maintenance on the newer system, says Baldwin.

“It seems like OEMs are coming out with magnets that consume less helium every year,” Amber Diagnostics’ Welch says. “It wouldn’t surprise me if one of the OEMs came out with a high-field MR that doesn’t require helium or took a different type of gas that’s cheaper or more abundant.”

Newer products require less liquid helium in them, as they are smaller vessels, so they will be less expensive to maintain. But the coldhead and compressor technology hasn’t changed and still needs to be maintained, according to Marc Fessler, partner at Independence Cryogenic Engineering.

“When the MRI system shuts down, there has been an excessive loss of liquid helium, so suddenly, all the money an end user has saved by not buying liquid helium will suddenly need to be spent on liquid helium again [if a customer does not incorporate preventive maintenance],” he says.

Owners and providers of helium consuming magnets are searching for alternatives. For example, GE’s South Carolina base uses about 5.5 million liters of helium and the company distributes about 6 million liters to service magnets. The company has invested approximately $1 million into its factory’s technology to help preserve helium and look into alternative resources, and two years ago, GE was the recipient of a $3.27 million National Institutes of Health grant to look into using magnesium-diboride wires. If the wires work, they could replace the nionium-titanium wires commonly used for the magnets. Nioniumtitanium wires are only superconducting at a temperature equivalent to about -443 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, even though the alloys for magnesium-dibroride wires are more expensive, they can become superconducting at much higher temperatures, potentially cutting the need for helium or even making it possible to use some other type of coolant or technique to keep a magnet from quenching.

September 2012 Magazine

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