NEW MRI ARRIVES AT DOCTORS PARK

Crews installed the 15-ton magnet for a new magnetic resonance imaging unit Thursday at Cape Radiology, 36 Doctors Park.

Dr. Craig Williams said the new Picker Outlook open MRI will be a boon for patients who can't use older, closed-model MRIs.

"When you climb inside the older MRIs, what they have is a long, open bore. When you climb inside this magnet, it's like you're sitting in a culvert," Williams said. "Ours is open on all four sides. Theoretically, you could have a child being scanned and his mother could be sitting there holding his hand."

Williams said an estimated 10 to 15 percent of patients can't get MRI scans from closed models because they are claustrophobic or anxious about being in closed-in spaces.

"I'm not claustrophobic, but they are nerve-wracking," he said.

The cost of the new unit was approximately $950,000, Williams said, and Cape Radiology hopes to use for four to five scans per day "if we're lucky."

"We don't really expect it to affect the hospitals' scans, because a lot of the patients that we'll be scanning are the ones that can't tolerate the long bores of their magnets," he said.

Cape Radiology didn't have to apply for a Certificate of Need from the state for the new MRI because the new unit came in just under the $1 million expenditure requirement for a state certificate.

"I expect we'll be tweaking the magnet for the next month or so," Williams said, adding the unit should be operational in November.

St. Francis Medical Center installed a new $1.6 million MRI unit in June 1997.

MRIs work by bombarding the body with radio frequencies. The radio frequencies realign protons in the atoms that make up the body, and the information from that realignment is converted by computer into a gray scale photo image.