Siemens Receives FDA Clearance for MRI System

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared Siemens Healthcare’s Magnetom Prisma, a 3 Tesla (3T) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner capable of extraordinarily high spatial and temporal resolution.

“Siemens is proud to add the Magnetom Prisma 3T scanner to our portfolio of MRI systems,” said Gregory Sorensen, M.D., CEO of Siemens Healthcare North America. “With applications that display functional information and enable the visualization of details in the smallest anatomical structures, the Magnetom Prisma enables researchers to explore new territories and address their specific research needs.”

The Magnetom Prisma features XR Gradients, which combine 80 milliTesla per meter (mT/m) with a 200T-per-meter-per-second (T/m/s) slew rate to offer a configuration unavailable in other commercial whole-body systems, Siemens claims. Complementing the power of the Magnetom Prisma’s XR Gradients is the system’s robust design. Precision is maintained throughout long, demanding applications such as functional MRI (fMRI). The power and endurance of the Magnetom Prisma’s XR Gradients fuel the system’s first-to-market Diffusion Spectrum Imaging (DSI) acquisition that enables the user to potentially resolve fine anatomical details of the brain such as crossing white-matter fibers.

Image quality is further enhanced by the Magnetom Prisma’s benchmark homogeneity and advanced shimming solutions that allow for finer, more effective compensation of patient-induced field disturbances. Together, these features provide the user with a solid basis for cardiac and body imaging, as well as applications such as spectroscopy, Siemens executives said.

The Magnetom Prisma possesses Siemens’ Dot (Day optimizing throughput) engines that enable consistency, which is crucial both in research applications and clinical work. The Dot engine brings automation and reproducibility to investigations across subjects, time points, and institutions, raising the integrity of longitudinal studies and multi-site research projects.

Siemens is offering onsite upgrades to the Magnetom Prisma to customers who have already installed the Magnetom Trio, a 3T MRI system with Tim (Total imaging matrix) technology.