What the world needs is a good $1000 MRI scan. Why can’t we talk about how to bring down the cost of MRI scanners so that one can be parked in a non-magnetic quonset at Wal-Mart? After all, the next wave of clinical business innovation has to crack the problem of how to provide lower octane health care. To be sustainable, the system requires a selection of non-premium services that are modern and sensitive, but are robust and inexpensive enough to operate at $1000 a pop.
Health care organizations need to stop sending the message to Siemens, Fujitsu, GE or whomever else makes MRI scanners that they need to offer more premium scanners with expensive features because others are paying for it. This is an amped up case of creeping featurism. What about moderate resolution with a basic package of options? Perhaps this is already happening?
Someone needs to offer the “Kia” of MRI scanners- a moderately priced system with enough features to be useful to 80 % of patients. If the 1 kilobuck scan turns up nothing, then the Doc ratchets up the horsepower another notch. This is the kind of thinking that is needed to keep the cost of treatment in line with inflation.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Don’t worry. President Obama is taking care of this.
Heathcare’s goal is cashflow through threat and treatment. The patient pool is unlimited, even in utero. To suggest economies through efficiency or, GASP!, cure is treason. Healthcare is a vital economic sector precisely because it is extortive. You pay for protection.
The perfect MRI would be high throughput, ambiguous, and with delayed side effects, thus investing in its own future. Consider the EPA or any “War on.” “Therapist” closes the gap in “the rapist.”
I always figured the bulk of the cost was the cryo liquid to keep the magnet going. Is the bulk of the cost really in the machine itself?
Hi Fell, see below. The name of the game in NMR is to have a strong and homogeneous magnetic field.
Hey, whatever happened to room temp superconductors? Were big in the early 90s.
Have people discovered an insurmountable obstacle??/
The materials found to be superconducting were ceramic in nature, so producing a conductor that could be wound to make a solenoid is a problem. For magnetic resonance, a solenoid provides a means of concentrating parallel magnetic field lines for maximum field strength and homogeneity. There might have been current density issues as well, I don’t recall.
I’m not sure that the cryostat end of the MRI is the expensive part anyway. Yeah, Liq He is not cheap, but the expensive part of the magnet is getting good, large bore, field homogeneity at 1.5 or 3 T.
And because these things are not being banged out like Buicks, the economies of scale are limited.
mri mri mri enough of this nonsence!!!! lets address a real issue!!!! It’s “SHARK WEEK” again on the science channel… give me some insight!! last year you covered it……. anything new?? I hear they are crossing lions and tigers…. any thing planned on the shark frontier???
Hey Gauss -here’s some inspiration.
UK to Install CCTVs in Private Homes to Monitor 20,000 ‘Sin Bins’
http://www.abajournal.com/news/uk_to_install_cctvs_in_private_homes_to_monitor_20000_sin_bins