by
John R. Fischer, Senior Reporter | April 27, 2022
Ohio Medical Center is now
using the system in its emergency room and Comprehensive Stroke Center operating room,
as is Queen's University and Kingston Health Sciences Centre in Canada for indigenous populations.
“Until recently, the technology for portable point-of-care imaging has not existed — resulting in inequitable access to healthcare and putting people at great risk simply due to their geographical limitations,” said Dr. Khan Siddiqui, chief medical officer and chief strategy officer of Hyperfine. “Swoop was designed to enable rapid diagnoses and treatment for every patient regardless of income, resources, or location, pushing the boundaries of conventional imaging technology and expanding patient access to lifesaving care.”
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The research at Yale and Harvard was funded by the National Institutes of Health as a large-scale study on the use of portable MR in different settings.
The findings were published in
Science Advances.
The authors were not available to speak with HCB News.
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Steven Ford
clarification on Swoop
May 04, 2022 11:43
The Swoop MRI is 0.064 Tesla field strength, not 0.64 Tesla; you repeated the same mistake made in another article.
I think a lot of readers would like to see a link to the studies that are cited. Some of those studies, reported in DotMed, compared the Swoop mobile to a Swoop fixed-site MRI, which is useful data but still comparing a very unusual MRI to itself, except not in a van, which is not the same as comparing to a 'conventional' fixed MRI.
It would be instructive to hear from doctors who are experts in stroke care to see whether or not this scanner is adequate for their needs, or if they would use it interchangeably with a high-field scanner, or if this is a 'better than nothing' device. Reportedly, the resolution of the machine is around 4mm in-plane, and of course a high-field scanner would typically be set to scan for strokes at about 0.5 mm in-plane. So, the scanner is 1/8 the resolution and 1/48 the magnet strength of a conventional scanner. The Swoop also does not have the ability to perform all the types of scans that a 'regular' MRI does, nor can it image in any chosen plane.
There are important reasons why high-field MRI has won out over the older low-field magnets that were tried years ago. In the USA, there is little demand for a low-quality low-versatility MRI, especially for Neuro work and especially when the reimbursement is identical to far more capable scanners.
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John R. Fischer
re: clarification on Swoop
May 05, 2022 03:52
Hi Steven,
Apologies for the error and thank you for pointing it out. I have made the correction and updated the article.
We appreciate your feedback and will definitely keep it in mind going forward.
John R. Fischer
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