Designing Engineering Upgradability into Magnetic Resonance Imagers: Impact on Future Costs

MRI is a powerful diagnostic modality of expanding availability. Equipment and installation amount to nearly $2M per site. An important component of diagnostic efficacy is not just equipment costs but also replacement costs, which for x-ray CT amount to 14-20% of the purchase cost per year; and in the early years of that technology reached 30-50%. We show how design choices made during the R&D stages of MRI development have allowed us to improve system performance parameters such as data reconstruction, archiving and display speeds, computational capabilities, operator interfaces, imaging sequence flexibility and signal-to-noise levels. Over the last four years these improvements have been made at a retrofit cost well below our target of 6-7% of the purchase price per year.