Cochlear implants for people with hearing problems, pacemakers and cardiac prostheses, bypass valves or neurostimulators housed in the brain, breast expanders... The advancement of medicine means that more and more people live with electronic devices or metal implants that sometimes They are vital and, other times, contribute to improving your quality of life. The presence of these devices, however, can condition the performance of medical tests such as magnetic resonance imaging, a key examination for the accurate diagnosis and monitoring of many pathologies. With the aim of minimizing cases of technological incompatibility, and making MRI accessible to patients with all types of devices, Ascires Grupo Biomedical, of which the Catalan medical team Cetir is a part, has developed a protocol that establishes the viability of the test in each case, depending on the specificity of the device/prosthesis, the examination area and the patient.
With more than 850 complex compatibility studies prepared to date, the protocol was presented this year at the 8th Joint Congress of the Spanish Society of Medical Physics and the Spanish Society of Radiological Protection. For each new case, the Medical Physics team, in collaboration with the professionals involved in the process (radiologists, specialists from different disciplines, Radiodiagnosis and Nuclear Medicine technicians (TSIDMN), professionals from the Ascires Patient Care Center, etc. .), analyzes and evaluates the feasibility of the required diagnostic examination.
The variety of cases is very wide, both in terms of the patients (age, pathology and clinical history), and the devices themselves. “To date, we have studied more than 30 categories of metal devices or implants and, for each one, there are several brands and models. Our purpose is to guarantee the necessary safety to perform the magnetic resonance (MR) test with the precision required by the Imaging specialist,” explains Luis Brualla, head of the Medical Physics area at Ascires. Each time the protocol is activated, Medical Physics collects all the information necessary to carry out the safety study (from relevant clinical data about the patient to technical manuals about the electronic device). With the crossing of all the information and the intervention of the different specialists involved, an internal report is prepared.
The document details whether the result is safe (the scan can be carried out without any particular consideration), unsafe (there is an incompatibility between the device and the MRI that makes it unsafe for the patient, so the scan cannot be carried out) or conditional (the test must be carried out meeting a series of conditions). “In most cases we manage to perform the test, but under specific conditions detailed in the report, which must be met from the moment the patient is scheduled until the preparation and completion of the exam,” explains Beatriz Chover, medical physicist at Ascires.
With this, the Radiodiagnosis team will be able to carry out the examination with complete peace of mind for the patient. With more than 550,000 patients treated per year, Ascires is a pioneer in Diagnostic Imaging (it introduced the first magnetic resonance imaging in Spain, just 40 years ago) and works with the latest medical technology. “The creation of a platform of this type, which we feed with new cases every day, is only possible when a significant volume of activity is carried out in Diagnostic Imaging, which makes us face increasingly complex cases,” emphasizes Brualla.
