BANGOR – As part of its ongoing commitment to providing state-of-the-art patient care, FirstMRI will be the first in the northern NE to offer GE Healthcare’s DiscoveryTM MR750 MR system. The Discovery MR750’s powerful 3.0T magnet delivers fast and highly accurate reproducible scans in high definition, allowing medical professionals to see smaller structures within the body. This powerful “3T” technology, coupled with enhanced imaging techniques, helps physicians to make a more confident diagnosis for their patients. Using the Discovery MR750, FirstMRI can deliver outstanding images of body, breast, musculoskeletal, neurological, vascular, and cardiac systems and pediatric structure.
MRI is a non-invasive procedure used to make images of the structure and function of the body, relying on a magnetic field to produce detailed images of the body in any plane. The Discovery MR750 offers substantial benefits for patients at FirstMRI including increased comfort, reduced exam times, and less need for rescanning due to patient movement.
According to Dr. Francis Kittredge, the “3T” offers significant advantages over earlier technology for many orthopedic, neurological, and breast imaging applications. The magnet’s “sensitivity to fine detail is significantly improved for certain applications, such as picking up small lesions in multiple sclerosis, allowing medical professionals to find up to twice as many lesions.” For certain orthopedic applications, “it is possible to see cartilage far better with the 3T in cases of joint injury or arthritis,” adds Dr. Kittredge. “The superior images are critical when a surgeon needs precise measurement of the cartilage. In other cases, the improved clarity can make a difference in making an accurate diagnosis or determining whether a particular medication or procedure should be recommended.”
The installation of the Discovery “3T” is just as amazing as the medical benefits offered by this medical technology. The new equipment will be lifted by a crane and lowered into the FirstMRI building through an opening in the roof when it arrives on December 21, 2009.