Interventional and intraoperative magnetic resonance imaging

Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research ii Health Technology Assessment Interventional and intraoperative magnetic resonance imaging The results may underestimate the capabilities of interventional/intraoperative MRI because of substantial confounding from the learning curve effect, but the presence of methodological flaws in the studies made it impossible to characterise the overall magn [...] The resultant images are based on the distribution of water and lipids within the tissues 2, 4. In practice In an MR scan examination, the patient is placed in the bore of a large magnet until the body part being scanned is in the exact centre or isocentre of the magnetic field. [...] The first stereotactic apparatus clinically deployed to guide neurosurgery was constructed in the late nineteenth century, but this method has only really come to the fore in the latter half of the twentieth century as a result of the parallel advances that occurred in computing and volumetric imaging. [...] The precision of stereotactic navigation systems depends on a number of factors including the preoperative image quality; the inherent technical accuracy of the system; the accuracy of the registration process, which projects the three dimensional preoperative images onto the corresponding anatomy of the patient; and the maintenance of consistent alignment between the coordinate systems, in both r [...] Moving the magnet to the patient High field systems The other way of maintaining a demarcated operating and imaging environment is to move the magnet rather than the patient.