Better and faster imaging is here today
“In just one week’s time we’d already seen parts of the cranial nerves with the 3.0T that we never saw on our 1.5T,” exclaimed Dr. Jan Casselman, Chairman of the Department of Radiology at AZ Sint-Jan AV in Brugge, Belgium.
Excited over his department’s latest addition – a new 3.0T X-series MR – Dr. Casselman was aware new technology could take time to integrate. But would that hold true here?
Getting up and running
Immediately following installation, Dr Casselman and his team began testing. To start, they looked to the Philips NetForum Community for established 3.0T protocols. “The sequences were set up in just one morning. My technicians and I were taking everything that exists down off of NetForum and trying them out. In one week we had the same image quality we had after 4 to 5 months of refinement with the 1.5T.
We’d only been working with our new 3.0T system a short time and nearly all the protocols in neurology ran better than they ever did on the 1.5T.”
New scanner technology
A full 50cm FOV and short (157 cm) patient-friendly gantry characterize the 3.0T X-series from Philips.
Features like 2K imaging, 4D-TRAK, SENSE, FiberTrak, SENSE Spectroscopy, and DWIBS contribute to the high speed and increased resolution that enables faster and more accurate diagnosis.
Seeing is believing
With the ability for higher resolution, Dr. Casselman expected good results, “We thought that the 3.0T was going to do the same job as the 1.5T – just better. We were wrong. It not only does it better, it does it faster.”
For Dr. Casselman whose focus is the head and neck area, identifying smaller structures such as nerves inside the internal auditory canal is important to assuring proper diagnoses. He had hoped the 3.0T could make these nerves visible on a routine basis. “We ran balanced FFE sequences for all the cranial nerves from one to twelve. And for the fourth nerve, where we use to see it one in three times on the 1.5T – now we see it every time on the 3.0T.”
Improved workflow
But the question remained, would these improvements in image quality come at the expense of scan time? Using Philips SENSE technology to deliver higher temporal and spatial resolution, Dr. Casselman tested and found time savings to be substantial. “Exams that were nine minutes long are now six minutes and the quality is better. Same for diffusion studies, we run high resolution 256 matrix diffusion sequences in just two minutes. This kind of speed is changing the way we work.”
A good business decision
Dr. Casselman feels if you want an exceptional scanner it will only be as good as its weakest component. “You must have good gradients, homogenous magnets, good hardware and good software. We got all that and more with the Philips 3.0T. We made no compromises.”
[Published: 2007-05-21]