Here are two articles on quiet MRIs:
1)
QUIET MRI REDUCING ANXIETY FOR PEDIATRIC PATIENTS
Originally published on December 10, 2015
Most recently updated on May 13, 2016
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BOARDMAN, Ohio - Fourteen year-old Leon Daugherty II of East Liverpool is no stranger to MRI's.
"The first time I did this, it took us five and a half hours to get done," said Leon Daugherty II.
The first time Leon had an MRI performed on his brain was five years ago when he was diagnosed with a slow moving brain tumor that had wrapped around his optic nerve. He's had his fair share of MRI scans since then, tracking the tumor's progress. He learned at his most recently scan, he will have to undergo brain surgery for the second time in five years.
"Any muscle movement can distort the machine's sight and they will re-start the scan and some can be 15 minutes long. So, you mess that up twice, that is an extra half hour," said Daugherty.
Recognizing comfort leads to better scans, Akron Children's upgraded its MRI technology, minimizing the loud sounds that come from the machine by up to 97% with an application known as Quiet Suite.
"In an MRI scan, it is very, very important to have the patient be very, very still for a long period of time. And so, having that Quiet Suite technology really, really helps with that goal, keeping them still. The more still we can keep them, the better imaging we get, the more detailed imaging we can get," said radiologist Dr. Richard McDonald with Akron Children's Hospital Mahoning Valley.
The hospital says the new technology has resulted in less sedations and fewer re-scans, creating a more comfortable patient experience.
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TECHNOLOGY
2) GE's Silent MRI Scanner Has Hit The Market
Quiet scans for everyone!
By
Shaunacy Ferro September 12, 2013
View attachment 13700
MRI SCANNER
Courtesy GE Healthcare
MRI scanners do a good job of imaging the brain to help doctors find potential health problems. But the experience of actually sitting in one leaves something to be desired. Aside from being cramped and claustrophobic, MRI scanners can get
LOUD.
Case in point, listen to this:
View attachment 13701
GE Healthcare says they're ushering in a future full of silent MRIs with Silent Scan, a new way to reduce noise in MRI scanning that just hit the commercial market. The press materials are a little coy about how this actually works, but say that it's a "radically new" way to acquire magnetic resonance data: "in combination with proprietary high-fidelity gradient and [radiofrequency] system electronics, noise is not merely dampened; it is virtually eliminated at the source."
GizMag explained it this way:
First, acoustic noise is essentially eliminated by using a new 3D scanning and reconstruction technique called Silenz. When the Silenz protocol is used in combination with GE's new high-fidelity MRI gradient and RF system electronics, the MRI scanning noise is largely eliminated at its source.
Basically, it's a software update that changes the way the scanner acquires the image.
According to GE, the typical MRI scanner generates 110 decibels of noise when it's hard at work, which is about the same noise level as a
rock concert or a steel mill.
One study found that certain MRI scanners could get up to 118 decibels at their loudest point. The Silent Scanner system, which reduces the volume of the scanner to normal background noise levels, quiet enough to have a conversation over. It's now commercially available in their 1.5T and 3.0T scanners (the T refers to the unit tesla, the way to measure the strength of a magnetic field), and has been used in a hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich.
Listen to GE's simulation, compared to the one above.
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