The Cabildo, through the Tenerife Medical Institute (Imetisa), has begun the installation of the most powerful and advanced MRI machine on the market, the Signa Premier XT, manufactured by GE Healthcare, whose cost is 2.5 million euros . It is the first in the Canary Islands and one of the few nationwide.
The president of Imetisa and island councilor for Social Action, Marián Franquet, values the arrival of this new team, “which will make it possible to make a significant technological leap and improve the service to public health patients.” Franquet assures that “the definition of the images is better, which will allow further fine-tuning of diagnoses”. With this new provision, public health in Tenerife and the scientific community of the University of La Laguna (ULL) are at the forefront of magnetic resonance imaging.
This machine allows the use of more flexible ultralight antennas, which will make it possible to adapt to the patient and the anatomy to be studied. The new advances are included within the AIRTM technology, thanks to which anatomical and functional images will be obtained that will allow greater diagnostic power.
The new machine is a 3 tesla device – the highest power available in its field – and is a pioneer in offering fully digital equipment. It has OPTIX-Fiber optic technology, which produces an increase in the signal-to-noise ratio –SNR for its acronym in English– in values greater than 27 percent. This increases performance, including processing speed, and allows studies to be done in a fraction of the time it would take the old Signa XT.
Imetisa is a public company of the Cabildo de Tenerife, owned by the Canary Health Service (SCS), in charge of providing nuclear magnetic resonance and hyperbaric chamber services. It was created in 1998 and since then it has provided services to public health in the diagnosis and treatment of patients and to the ULL in scientific research.
This acquisition and the recent announcement of the arrival of a new manager –Néstor Sánchez– seem to illuminate a new era in the company, under the shadow of alleged irregularities in recent years. In fact, a widespread proposal inside and outside the Cabildo is the transfer of Imetisa to the SCS.
