From the October 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

“Now they are dealing with compromised imaging until someone gets there to do the task and see what’s going on and then they have the repairs to deal with,” says Profeta.

When a facility purchases a new MR, they must have the room tested, but before they get to that point, they already would have hired a contractor, rented a mobile or suspended MR procedures until the project is finished.

However, if they find out after the test that the room has a lot of problems, that will add more days to the project, which will cost them more money. “You won’t get away from the cost of the repairs but you can get away from the surprise of adding time to your project that you didn’t budget for,” says Profeta.
Profeta is a big advocate of repairing shields rather than purchasing a new one because he believes it’s always less expensive. “You can always fix it and it’s always cheaper and it’s not compromising any quality,” he says.

ETS-Lindgren also believes that facilities should avoid purchasing a new MR shield. When a client is purchasing a 1.5T MR, they will ask them if they are considering upgrading to a 3T MR in th answer is yes, then they will recommend designing the room for a 3T MR so that they won’t have to upgrade the RF shield or get a new one.

“You’re largely reusing that shield and you’re minimizing your construction costs and your downtime,” says Kellogg.

However, there are times when a new shield is needed, but that’s usually when it’s over 20 years old. “If the shielding is in really bad shape — it’s not testing well, they’re finding all sorts of problems with the shield — then there may be a recommendation to pull that out and replace it,” said Kellogg.

The complexity of an iMR shield
A lot has to be taken into consideration when constructing a RF shield for an MR suite, but shielding for intraoperative MR (iMR) can be even more cumbersome. The MR can be sited three different ways — permanently or temporarily in the surgical suite or in a room adjacent to it.

When the MR is in an adjacent room, the only primary shielding requirement is a connecting RF door, which can either be a swinging double or a sliding door.

It gets more complicated and costly when the MR is permanently within the surgical suite. The entire suite has to be RF shielded and every service coming into or out of the suite has to have a RF filter or waveguide.

Additionally, instead of just having one door like a typical MR room, it must have multiple doors and all of them must be RF shielded. “You’ll have multiple doors going into the OR and the MR rooms and adjoining rooms as well, and that creates a situation where you really need to pay attention to how you’re coordinating or interlocking these doors,” says ETS-Lindgren’s Kellogg.

October 2014 Magazine

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