"A facility must be prepared and capable for electronic,mechanical, and cosmetic work," noted Bruce Smith, VP Multi-vendor Service, Sonora Medical Systems, Longmont, CO. "Some coil parts are readily available; some, like connectors, are proprietary and require reengineering or some other solution to be able to repair them."

"Depending on the model, the coils all have different interfaces and signals that they use so we have to set up a test bench to mimic all that. We have to emulate the scanner itself and the signals," said Ray McClellan, President, MRI Technical Services, Inc., Marietta, GA, a Philips shop. "Common repairs are active components inside the coil-preamps, diodes and some mechanical damage because they are handled so much."

"It's about a 50/50 split between mechanical repairs and electrical repairs," explained MEDRAD's Watson. "On the mechanical side it could be a crack in the housing, a chip, or a missing part... On the electrical side, there can be some drifting of components which leads to tuning specifications that need to be done. So there might be some updates on the [signal-to-noise ratio], there might be an artifact that needs to be eliminated. We will look at that from a component level and then fix those."

Business Trends Reflect Larger Market Forces

Healthcare trends overall have trickled down to MRI coil markets. As noted, capital equipment budget tightening at hospitals puts the onus on repair as agreater priority for equipment in the installed base. In addition, companies are merging, leaving fewer, larger players side by side with very small, niche shops and perhaps very little in between.


"There has been tremendous consolidation among the coil OEMs over the past decade. Where we used to have several OEMs making coils, today there are three major ones (Invivo, MEDRAD and USAI) and two of them (Invivo, USAI)are owned by equipment OEMs [Philips and GE respectively]," said Sagadin.

Since coils are specific to particular procedures, some spinoff companies have been formed by physicists from academic research institutions who focus on coils for highly specialized research and clinical applications. Other small OEMs use their know-how and speed to market to compete.

An example of a smaller shop is Midwest RF, LLC, Hartland, WI. "We have our own product line of mostly interventional coils for radiation oncology and those applications, and we do peripheral devices - non-magnetic things for comfort or positioning inside the MR suite," said David M. Peterson, Director of Operations. The company also performs custom coil work with university researchers or on new procedures like highly focused areas of the head.

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