Synaptive Medical is reporting that its Evry MRI scanner has won FDA clearance. The device is designed to make magnetic resonance imaging of the head more accessible, cheaper, and easier to manage than many current systems that require specially-built facilities, safety procedures, and costly regular helium refills.
The Evry is a medium power (0.5 Tesla) scanner that doesn’t need cranes and rigging to be installed, no special floor or cryogen pipe, nor are there annual cryogen refills to pay for. Also, unlike most other MRIs, the superconducting magnet of this unit can be turned on and off within fifteen minutes.
The device is meant to scan the head and may be particularly beneficial in emergency departments, as patients don’t have to be wheeled to a separate radiology ward for MRI scanning. Having a 5 Gauss line at only four feet (1.2 m) around the scanner helps with patient handling while maintaining everyone’s safety.
A bore of 24 inches (60 cm) width and 39 inches (one meter) length helps while assessing large patients and reduces claustrophobia for others.
Some of the tech specs of the Evry MRI, according to Synaptive:
Multichannel head coil: 16 channel head coil with patient specific customized fitting intended to optimize image quality
High performance gradients: Asymmetric gradient design to produce 100 mT/m @ 400 T/m/s on each axis to achieve more time efficient pulse sequence encoding
Pulse sequences: T1 (2D/3D), T2, T2*, DWI and MRA to support advance brain MRI techniques
Fully digital receive chain: Directly sampled signal without mixing to an intermediate frequency in order to reduce overall image noise
