Possibility of spreading 0cardiac MRI examinations in small and medium-sized institutions

Abstract

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) imaging examination has many points of concern including the complexity of the examination procedure and the specifications of MRI device. These concerns make the small-and-medium scaled facilities hesitate to incorporate this examination. The MRI device software has not been updated at our hospital after its introduction in 2010. However, we tried a re-start led by the radiological technologist who had abundant experience of CMR under the instruction of cardiologist familiar with CMR.

We adopted imaging method used in pediatric cardiology because of its high reproducibility. Before starting examination, we evaluated the difference between engineers at the time of the imaging planning among radiological technologists, and no significant difference was recognized. In addition, the results of automatic analysis of the radiologist and the workstation for medical image processing for the patients performed at our hospital showed a difference due to poor image quality. Therefore, multiple radiologists performed image analysis and evaluated, but no difference was found. Our evaluation result suggests that CMR examination can be restored anew, and it could be more readily available in a small-and-medium scaled facility such as ours.