News at Major Hospital

News At Major hospital

Hospital’s MRI goes beyond state-of-the-art

Saturday; July 03, 2004

By: John Walker, Shelbyville News

More powerful, faster, roomier, quieter. It sounds like the accolades sung about the latest luxury sport car.

In this case, those adjectives are being used to describe Major Hospital’s new MRI unit - one of only about 10 such units in the country - which uses technology not found on any other MRI in the state.

“This is a very nice machine,” said radiologic technologist Greg Combs, sounding like a driver behind the wheel of a new Ferrari, and sometimes grinning like one, too.

Combs was using the hospital’s new machine to examine a patient’s wrist on the day The Shelbyville News visited Major Hospital recently, his face in the darkened control room of the MRI unit in the hospital’s basement lit by the glow of images taken from three angles - above, from the side and lengthwise - that appeared on the computer screen in front of him.

Hospitals use Magnetic Resonance Imaging to create digital pictures of the interior of the human body to diagnose ailments. MRI units use a powerful magnet that actually realigns the water molecule s in the body to produce the images, Combs explained.

“MRI, doesn’t use radiation. That’s one of the plusses for the patient,” he said.

Major Hospital’s $1.2 million Toshiba “Vantage” MRI unit, online for about one month, has a magnet five times more powerful than the open-sided MRI it replaced and about 15,000 times more powerful than the Earth’s magnetic field, he said.

The magnet is so strong that hospital staff at all levels, from nurses and technicians to the cleaning crews, receive special training to work around the MRI unit. Any metal object that can be magnetized would become a potentially lethal projectile if it got too close to the machine, which is shielded by thick steel in the walls, floor and ceiling of the room where it’s kept and is never turned off because of the length of time - not to mention the $5,000 cost - to start it up again.

However, the more powerful the magnet, the better the image.

“You get so much more information off this magnet than with the old magnet,” said Mona Bernard, director of radiology for Major Hospital.

Besides making better pictures, the new MRI unit is almost twice as fast as the old one. An exam that used to take 45 minutes now takes just 25 to 30 minutes, another plus for the patient, Combs said.

The Vantage is what’s known as a “short-bore” MRI; that is, the tunnel which the patient enters for the exam on this machine is just 1.5 meters, about five feet. That helps eliminate that claustrophobic feeling some patients experience undergoing an MRI exam, because their entire body is not inside the machine, he said.

Besides being short, the bore is also 65 centimeters - more than 25 inches - in diameter. In other words, roomy.

“This is the shortest bore out there, the biggest bore out there and the quietest,” said Rick Bennett, customer engineer technical coordinator for Toshiba America Medical Systems Inc., the manufacturer.

It’s the quietest thanks to “Pianissimo.”

That musical term, which means to play very softly, is what Toshiba calls the noise-reduction technology that is on the Vantage. It is the only machine which such technology in the state of Indiana, Bennett said.

Pianissimo results in a 90 percent drop in the noise level of the MRI. With the old machine, you could hear it way down the hall in the doctor’s offices during a patient exam, he said.

Now, Combs noted, he can play music for the patients while they’re being examined.

In a plus for doctors as well as the patients, the digital MRI pictures can be put into a computer database and become part of a patient’s electronic medical file.

A physician can access the patient’s entire medial history, including the MRI images, securely over the Internet from anywhere using software developed for OpenMed Midwest LLC, a company started by Major Hospital, said Bob Carmony, who does marketing for Major Hospital.

“Very few hospitals have that,” he said.