From the September 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Speeding things up
Most hospitals are concerned with cutting costs and increasing efficiency in this new health care environment. The manufacturers are responding to this by offering technology that speeds up MR exams. At last year’s RSNA, GE unveiled its SIGNA Pioneer 3.0 Telsa MR system that features a new technique called MAGiC that reduces imaging times by up to two-thirds. The time saved may allow physicians to scan one additional patient per hour, every hour of every day, according to GE.

Also at RSNA, Siemens unveiled its MAGNETOM Amira MR system that can speed up exams to as little as 10 minutes. The system is currently under development and is not for sale.
In July, the Medical Research Council announced that it developed a new MR technique that can speed up exams for patients who cannot hold their breath. Researchers have already tested it on liver patients with type 2 diabetes and were able to cut the amount of time they had to hold their breath from 18 to four seconds.

The technique takes advantage of the fact that MR images can be mathematically compressed, which means that much less information is needed to produce a detailed view of the liver. Usually, if scan time was reduced to four seconds, the image would be blurred, but the new technique was able to generate an image with the same quality as the longer scan.

So far, the technique has been tested on 11 patients, but more research is required. If the technique proves to be effective, it may be used for a wider range of organs and disease types.

7T in the clinical setting?
The standard of care for MR imaging is to use a 3T machine, but that may change in the near future. 7T MR systems are only used for research, but Siemens is developing its Magnetom Terra 7 Tesla MR system for clinical use. Siemens built it to be 50 percent lighter than previous actively shielded 7T magnet generations. It features a dual mode technology that enables the user to switch from research modes to clinical protocols in less than 10 minutes.

Philips and GE are also pioneers in the 7T MR field, but their systems are only for research purposes. Philips’ system is the Achieva 7.0T MR research system and GE’s is the Discovery MR950. Even though it’s solely a research modality for now, it’s still helping academic institutions that are making groundbreaking discoveries.

In June, Duke Medicine researchers developed a 3-D model of the human brain stem using 7T MR technology that will better guide deep brain stimulation procedures for tremors and Parkinson’s disease. The researchers used a 7T MR to generate a 10-day scan of a healthy donor’s postmortem brain stem and then converted it into a 3-D model using an open source, data-intensive computing system platform. The model can then be scaled to match patients’ individual brain anatomy.

September 2015 Magazine

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