GE Healthcare Subsidiary to Develop Improved MRI Techniques for Children

A subsidiary of GE Healthcare is teaming up with clinicians and researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and Ohio State University to find better ways to take magnetic resonance images of children.

The project involves the development of new ways to keep children still during surgeries that use MRI technologies and produce clearer images.

GE Healthcare’s MR business general manager Jim Davis said that MRI seems ideal for paediatric imaging.

"It has the ability to display anatomy in detail, providing radiologists many ways to examine living tissue without surgery or radiation," Davis said.

Developed from the MRI Imaging and Devices for Paediatric Populations project, the paediatric coils will be used for taking MR images of children's heads, hearts and other body parts, according to Mass Device.

GEHC Coils, the former USA Instruments, will use a $1m Ohio Third Frontier grant to work with the medical centre.

Ohio State's Davis Heart and Lung Institute in designing, building and validating MRI coils and surgical fixation devices for children.