So for those currently dissatisfied with the capabilities of 1.5 T and 3 T MRI imaging technology, the US Food and Drug Administration has just approved a 7 T MRI device called a “Siemens Magnetom Terra”.
For those who don’t understand what the 7 T bit means, 7 T is an abbreviation for 7 teslas. A tesla is a measure of the strength of a magnetic field. So a 7 T MRI machine is 2.3 times as powerful as a 3 T machine. However, to put this in terms rather more meaningful to the average guy in the street (i.e., your sitemaster), a 7 T magnetic field is about 140,000 times (yes, that’s one hundred and forty thousand times) stronger than the magnetic field of planet Earth itself!
You can find the complete media release from the FDA if you click here. However, …
Don’t expect to find such a machine in your local, community-based MRI center for a while. According to the BBC, the one that they started to put in at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital at the University of Glasgow late last year was going to cost £10 million (i.e., about US$13.3 million) … and the unit that had to be built to house it was going to cost about another US$42.5 million! Heaven alone knows what the cost will be to actually get one’s prostate scanned by one of these machines!
If you’d like to get your own MRI machine so that you can scan yourself at home, then just check out the Block Imaging price guide for 2017! You can get yourself at least one 3 T MRI machine for between $250,000 and $400,000 …. It’s a steal! (But you’d still need to pay for it to be properly set up and maintained!)
Filed under: Diagnosis, Management, Risk | Tagged: 7-T, imaging, MRI |
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