MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging 2016 | Page 10

advances in imaging technology

‘GOBrain’ Protocol For MRI Makes Brain Exams
Faster, More Comfortable For Patients
The protocol is a product of a longstanding collaboration with Siemens Healthcare
Time is one of the great challenges
with magnetic resonance imaging.
This is especially true in the context
of the clinical exam.
The typical MRI brain exam can
take 20, 30 or even 40 minutes, and
this produces a significant burden.
A burden in terms of cost and efficiency, stemming from the relatively
low throughput with MR imaging.
But more importantly a burden to
the patient, who needs to lie very
still in the scanner for long periods
of time, a requirement that often
proves uncomfortable and even distressing.
All of this could soon change. The
MGH Martinos Center and Seimens
Healthcare have together developed
an application, called GOBrain, that
can reduce the length of the typical MRI exam by up to eight times,

allowing clinically relevant brain
scans in only five minutes. Siemens
introduced GOBrain at the November 2015 meeting of the Radiological Society of North America; FDA
approval was announced in April.
The development of GOBrain was
a response to a particular clinical
need at MGH: namely, the need to
improve the throughput of MRI
brain exams. Installing more scanners wouldn’t be practical given
the hospital’s dense urban campus,
said Bruce Rosen, the Director of
the Martinos Center, so they would
have to do this by reducing the
length of individual exams.

the healthcare giant to improve MRI
through a range of technological
advances. Among these: advances
in “parallel imaging,” which enables
faster and more precise scanning
through the use of multiple “coils.”
the detectors of the radiofrequency
signal in MR imaging.
The Center has devoted a tremendous amount of time and effort to
developing parallel imaging. Over
the past 20+ years, its researchers have focused on designing and
building larger and larger detector
arrays, taking advantage of increases in the number of channels in MRI
scanners, which has grown from a
single channel in the early 1990s to
as many as 128 channels today.

This need dovetailed with work
coming out of a longstanding collaboration between the Martinos Cen- The initial goal with the arrays was
ter and Siemens. For more than 15 to increase the quality of the imyears, the Center has partnered with ages acquired, but it turned out this