Author(s): Prasad Vadday / Dr Martin Graves

Hospital: Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Reference: RAD Magazine, 46, 542, 17-18

Excerpt: 

One of the daily challenges facing MRI radiographers is making patients of widely different body habitus comfortable enough to complete the investigation without moving. Patients may arrive for their scan in pain, often localised to the imaging area of interest, or they may develop discomfort and ultimately pain during the examination.

Discomfort can arise from pressure points associated with rigid hard shell coils, such as used for imaging the knee, or from the physical weight of the coil on the patient’s anatomy, such as the coils used for imaging the thorax and abdomen. In order to maximise image quality these coils need to be positioned as closely as possible to the area of interest. Once patients start to feel discomfort they are prone to movement, either during the acquisition so corrupting the data, or between acquisitions, which may have an impact on the planning of subsequent acquisitions.