The first Intera very high field scanner has been installed at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University and ETH in Zùrich, Switzerland. The institute has served as a key luminary site for Philips Medical Systems, having developed the earliest version of the company’s Sensitivity Encoding (SENSE) technology. The potential of this technique and others will be explored on the 3-tesla product. Key projects will be investigations of epilepsy and the metabolism of glutathione and its role in psychiatric diseases. The higher signal-to-noise potential and scanning speeds possible on the 3-tesla system will allow studies of cardiac function and enhanced coronary MRA. Spectroscopic analyses of phosphorous metabolites such as ATP and phosphorous creatine will be used to examine cardiac contractility. The 3-tesla installation comes less than a year after Philips revealed plans to develop the product, which is designed for routine clinical as well as research scanning. The new product, along with an Intera 1.5-tesla scanner, will serve as the nucleus of a major MR research and competence center scheduled to open at the institute in the third quarter of this year.
