From the November 2021 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

"Enhanced image acquisition and reconstruction techniques, and speed of acquisition have led to clinical benefits in interventional imaging, vascular, abdomen, oncology and cardiac," Poornima Srinivasan, industry analyst for medical imaging, healthcare and life sciences at Frost & Sullivan, told HCB News. "Portable or point-of-care MR is a game-changing technology that is expected to influence and make scanning accessible to patients in ER, ICU, and other critical-care units across the location of care."

He adds that the MR segment is expected to continue to shrink with the wider adoption of 1.5T and 3T MR systems that incorporate increased field of view and radiofrequency (RF) channels, and enhanced signal-to-noise ratio for optimized patient throughput. The current MR market earned $3.99 billion revenue-wise in 2019 and is predicted to have a compound annual growth rate of 2.5% by 2024. COVID-19, however, has slowed the market down, and it is likely to not reach pre-COVID levels until 2023.


Growth is slated to be diverse among different regions. For North America, a 3%-4% boost in MR procedural volume over the past three years has been seen in the U.S. and 0.9% growth has been seen in Canada. Western Europe has seen moderate growth in 1.5T and 3T MR for brain, MSK, and oncology imaging.

Abbreviated breast MR may enable quality diagnostic scans at reduced cost and time
Abbreviated breast MR may save physicians more time and expense, while still being able to efficiently identify breast cancer.

That’s according to researchers at Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine in Seoul, South Korea. "Despite the high diagnostic performance of breast MR, its application as a cancer screening tool is hindered by high costs and longer acquisition and interpretation times," the group wrote in March. "Abbreviated MR protocols show equivalent diagnostic accuracy for cancer while reducing acquisition and interpretation times compared with conventional full-protocol MR."

Abbreviated breast MR reduces scanning time from 30 minutes to about 10 minutes, according to the authors. Data on its performance, however, is limited.

The authors assessed its use over three consecutive years on 1,975 women who underwent 3,037 exams between September 2015 and August 2018. They evaluated cancer detection rate, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, abnormal interpretation rate, and interval cancer rates. Of the women examined, 14% were at high risk, 82.7% had an intermediate risk, and 3.3% were at average risk. The last of these three groups underwent breast MR either by patient request or surgeon recommendation.

November 2021 Magazine

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