From the September 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
As important as flexibility is the fact that each coil is adapted to the patient’s size: this ensures that all the channels of the coil contribute to the scan. This is especially true for the small bodies of pediatric patients.
“If you take a 32-channel adult array to scan a 5-year-old patient” Lustig said, “in practice, only a small number of channels, 8 or 10, are actually on the patient and capture the signal. All the others only contribute to noise.” This is detrimental for image quality and prevents the reliable use of acceleration techniques, such as parallel imaging.
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Developing coils for pediatric patients was the original motivation for the invention of printed coils. It started when Lustig attended a presentation by fellow UC Berkeley professor Arias, a printed electronics expert.
Printing the electric circuit on thin, flexible substrates
using conductive inks results in lightweight
and inexpensive, blanket-like coil arrays
“After my talk”, Arias recalled, “Michael came and asked if I could print coils. ‘What are coils?’, I replied, and that is how it began.” With the addition of then-Ph.D. student Joseph Corea and Dr. Balthazar Lechêne as a postdoc, along with other group members, their team worked closely with Stanford pediatric radiologist Dr. Shreyas Vasanwala to address the absence of adequate scanning coils for pediatric patients.
It took 6 years of development to reach the point they are at today: testing their lightweight coils on more than 100 pediatric patients at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. InkSpace’s printed pediatric coils are even wrapped in a friendly, dinosaur-patterned fabric that kids respond to enthusiastically.
“InkSpace Imaging’s printed coils enhance patient safety and comfort, and make exams less stressful,” notes Dr. Vasanawala.
One of Dr. Vasanawala’s 5-year-old patients was known to be very nervous and fidgety during exams. Typical of small children, he was scheduled to have general anesthesia prior to the scan. However when he came for the exam, he started naming the dinosaurs on the InkSpace “blanket” coil and was able to go through the whole exam without anesthesia. In fact, he reacted so well to the experience that his exam lasted 30 min instead of the two hours scheduled.
