Philips Medical Systems has installed the first magnetic resonance angiography package for its 0.5-tesla Gyroscan T5 magnetic resonance imaging system. The premier North American clinical test site is New Britain General Hospital in New Britain, CT.
The vendor will show initial results from this mid-field MRA site at the Society for Magnetic Resonance Imaging conference in Chicago next week, said Joseph Vacca, director of MRI.
Preliminary experience with MRA on the mid-field scanner indicates that sufficient diagnostic information is being provided, although high-field MRA may have shorter imaging times and better signal-to-noise, he said. Philips has developed its MRA package to run on both the T5 and its 1.5-tesla Gyroscan S15/ACS unit. The software is also available for older S15 systems with a high-performance upgrade.
Philips offers what it calls a "Siamese" program for mid-field and high-field MRA, Vacca said.
"All the (MRA) software we will develop for ACS will work on the T5, and everything developed for the T5 will work on the ACS. We have to let the customers decide where it works best. Let the chips fall where they may," he said.
MRA techniques were originally thought to be limited to high-field scanners with sufficiently strong signals. But a number of MR vendors, including Philips, Toshiba and Resonex, discussed research in mid-field MRA at the Radiological Society of North America conference in November.
Philips has seen significant improvement in the quality of its mid-field MRA images since the RSNA meeting and expects further improvement as it continues to adjust pulse sequences on the T5 for optimization of MRA, Vacca said.
