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Top Stories of 2017

by Gus Iversen, Editor in Chief | November 29, 2017
From the November 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

The holidays and RSNA are upon us, which can only mean one thing: It’s time to start looking back at 2017 and compiling lists of the biggest events of the year.

For HealthCare Business News, that means looking at the stories that have shaken up the medical industry.

Whether it be the FDA approving new technology, researchers adding clarity to the way certain treatments impact patient outcomes, shifting focal points among the major OEMs or legislation poised to change the way hospitals think about their budgets and service contracts — there has been no shortage of high-impact headlines in 2017.

The editorial staff at HCB News has chiseled them down to the following eight items.

7T MR enters U.S. market

The fact that the tech climate has shifted decidedly toward software and processing capabilities made the FDA clearance of the Siemens Healthineers 7 Tesla MAGNETOM Terra in October that much more remarkable.

To give some perspective, the majority of MR scanners on the market are still 1.5 Tesla (a unit of magnet strength named for Nikola Tesla) and 3 Tesla systems (the highest strength magnets that had been on the market) have already been available for nearly 20 years.

With the system’s ultra-high-field magnet strength, the MAGNETOM Terra may help clinicians visualize previously unseen anatomical structures, forging new inroads toward a more complete understanding of disease and human anatomy.

“The overall image quality of MR improves with higher magnetic field strength,” stated Robert Ochs, director of the Division of Radiological Health in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “The added field strength allows for better visualization of smaller structures and subtle pathologies that may improve disease diagnosis.”

According to Siemens, the MAGNETOM Terra is ideal for performing neurological and musculoskeletal exams and has more than double the signal-to-noise ratio of a standard 3T system. Its hyper-fast image reconstruction technology also makes it up to 20 times faster than previous generations of 7T research systems.

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