Dr. Howard Smith Oncall

Vidcast:  https://www.instagram.com/p/C8Abp8MRWVR/ Magnetic resonance scanners are typically huge, heavy, and expensive machines.  The typical commercial units occupy an entire room, weigh 6 to 13 tons, and cost north of $1 million.  Now the Hyperfine company has received FDA clearance to further develop its Swoop scanner, a portable so-called low power unit that can be brought to a patient’s room or the operating room to image the head and brain.  It could cost as little as $50-100,000 and weigh about 3,000 lbs, or one-quarter to one-eighth of a standard MR scanner. These little, portable scanners have lower powered magnets in the 0.05 Tesla range compared with the current 3 Tesla machines.  The lower power yields a lower resolution image, but the power of artificial intelligence can beef up the image to yield clinically-valuable information in a timely fashion. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adm7168 https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/big-breakthrough-new-low-field-mri-safer-and-easier-202