New MRI ‘hero’ machine cuts exam time by up to two-thirds

WESTFORD, Mass. — It may be painless, but few medical tests provoke more fear and apprehension than Magnetic Resonance Imaging or the MRI.

“I think for a lot of patients an MRI is a very challenging examination,” said David Rose, MD, chairman of radiology at Emerson Health.

Challenging because many patients experience claustrophobia once inside the MRI machine -- and little wonder. First, they are inserted into the narrow, tubular space that makes MRI scans possible. Next, they are bombarded with banging and clanging -- noises that indicate the machine’s magnets are scanning through soft tissue.

“”It really is very helpful for injuries of cartilage, injuries of muscle,” said Rose.

And now, MRIs are finding increasing use as a screening test -- for such things as prostate and breast cancer, said Peter Ferrari, president of Shields MRI. Coupled with the pandemic and an aging population, he said MRIs are in high demand these days.

“I’ve been at Shields for almost 20 years now and we’ve never seen anything like this,” said Ferrari. “And it’s across the whole region, there are long backlogs.”

Shields has begun to address that backlog with the help of a new MRI machine. The Hero, manufactured by General Electric, can drastically cut MRI scan times.

“A traditional MRI might have been 35-40 minutes,” Ferrari said. “We can do that now in 10 or 15 minutes.”

The Hero accomplishes this task through use of artificial intelligence, Ferrari said, which allows it to conduct the same number of scans as previous MRI machines -- but at a much faster clip.

“The scan times are faster, the image quality is better,” said Rose. “Unfortunately we can’t really get rid of the noise. That would be fantastic if we could, but with the scan times being shorter, people are really finding it more tolerable.”

The Hero is now in operation at a couple of Shields locations -- most recently at its Westford clinic. A couple of weeks ago, Jason Campbell of Pepperell became the first patient to be scanned by the new machine.

“I heard they were kind of arduous,” he said. “Kind of an ordeal. If you had any concerns with claustrophobia then it wasn’t for you.”

But Campbell was pleasantly surprised.

“I sat in that machine for about eleven minutes for a full scan on my shoulder,” he said. That’s compared to one of Campbell’s friends who, with a similar injury, endured a 45-minute MRI.

“I really had no idea what I was getting into,” Campbell said. “It was really easy.”

Drew Juliano suffers a chronic shoulder injury, so he’s had MRIs before.

“I had another MRI done maybe two or three years ago, and it just seemed like a bigger production,” he said. “To get in and out of there in maybe ten, fifteen minutes... just seemed quicker, easier and more efficient.”

Ferrari said eventually, Shields will deploy more Hero MRI machines across its network. But any MRI machine is expensive -- price tags of more than $1 million are not uncommon.

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