4 ms·
Why is it so limited in the US? In other countries, they can go well above 10 tesla leading to a dramatic increase in resolution. I assumed it was because the
by dsugarman 11y ago
Why is it so limited in the US? In other countries, they can go well above 10 tesla leading to a dramatic increase in resolution. I assumed it was because there were some inherent danger from more powerful magnets.
- ska 11y agoThat's not really correct. There are high field research magnets, but most of the stuff over 7T are small animal magnets anyway (it is very much easier to maintain homogeneity in the main field over a smaller bore. So you're well into "research only" territory here. There are other trade offs with field strength also, so it really isn't a matter of just "bigger is better".
- dsugarman 11y agoI am talking about research, I almost worked on a project about 5 years ago using >10T MRI datasets from South Korea. The resolution was not on the same playing field as the US datasets available.
- ska 11y agoSuch research scanners exist in the US as well. None of this is clinically relevant, and none of it is US specific. To be fair, the SAR problems become bigger at bigger fields too, which is related to what you are talking about. It's not really sensible to talk about this as a "problem of bigger fields" because it is there for all systems, and furthermore is also pulse-sequence dependent. By which I mean you may have a pulse sequence that is fine at 3T but woudl be dangerous at 7T, or 7T -> 10T or whatever.