LHSC adds new MRI machine to help reduce patient wait times

London’s largest hospital has added a new imaging machine for less urgent cases that it says will help to reduce patient wait times for medical scans.

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The first hospital in Canada to adopt the new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, made by health care equipment giant Siemens, the London Health Sciences Center (LHSC) says the machine will be used for patients with less urgent needs who can visit and leave the hospital on the same day.

“This new unit (machine) comes with various new technology which allows us to be more efficient and it can reduce our scan lengths,” Marcia Trieu, director of medical imaging at LHSC’s Victoria Hospital, said Thursday.

Patients are now being scheduled for August, with the new machine expected to be able to handle 4,000 scans a year. The machine will operate eight hours a day on weekends, processing two or three scans an hour — or roughly 340 patients a month, Trieu said.

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MRI technology is not new, but the latest imaging machine added at LHSC has features that stand out including a larger opening for patients being scanned – they lie down for the procedure in a ring-ling opening – and artificial intelligence capabilities, the hospital said.

Like X-rays and CT scans, MRI scans are another form of imaging diagnostics widely used in health care. The technology employs a magnetic field – the new unit uses a lower-strength magnet, LHSC says – and radio waves to take pictures inside the body. Typically, MRI is used to examine soft tissues such as organs and muscles, which X-rays cannot capture.

With a focus on less urgent cases, the new machine will help, for example, to reduce wait times for patients needing brain and knee scans, Trieu said.

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Adding a new traditional MRI machine to a hospital can be costly, with the tab running to $5 million or more, for reasons that extend beyond the technology itself to include new space and construction often needed to handle the units.

But the new LHSC machine is housed in a self-contained unit connected to Victoria Hospital by an enclosed walkway. Lifted into place by a crane after the unit arrived from Germany on a transport flatbed last month, the hospital said it avoided the extra costs of construction and “significantly reduced the amount of time” needed to make it operational, with only a one-month turnaround to commission the unit.

The Ontario government helped to cover the cost.

“We are grateful to Ontario Health and the Ministry of Health for helping us to fund this new MRI technology, which raises the standard of diagnostic imaging and reflects our dedication to making advanced health care accessible,” said David Musyj, LHSC’s interim president and chief executive.

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Now equipped with five MRI machines, the hospital will be better able to match patients to the machine “that best suits their individual health-care needs,” said Dr. Narinder Paul, LHSC’s head of medical imaging.

He said the new machine will effectively be operated like an outpatient service, with patients booked in back-to-back for faster service than if the unit was also being used for patients inside the hospital. With its wider opening, the machine will also be more comfortable for claustrophobic and large patients, he added.

With its lower-strength magnet, about one-third as powerful as in a traditional machine, the new unit is also better for patients with pacemakers or joint replacements who can feel discomfort in their implants from a machine’s heating during scans, said Paul. The unit’s artificial intelligence capabilities are also expected to help speed things along, with less training needed for technologists using the machine and the majority of the scanning processes automated, he said.

The machine isn’t exactly “push-button technology,” but it’s about as close it gets for an MRI machine, Paul said.

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