Quality Assurance Service meeting or exceeding the accreditation of the American College of Radiology for three 3T and two 7T scanners.

The NIIH/NIMH/FMRIF currently operates three 3T (high field) and two 7T (ultra-high field) human MRI systems within the NMR MRI Research Center at NIH.

• FMRIF 3TA (GEHealthcare MR750 3T)
• FMRIF 3TB (GE Healthcare MR750 3T)
• FMRIF 3TD (Siemens Skyra 3T)
• FMRIF 7TA (Siemens Magnetom 7T Plus)
• FMRIF 7TB (Siemens Magnetom 7T Terra)

The performance of all these systems is exquisitely sensitive to all the subsystems of the MRI. The quality of the fMRI research conclusions thus depends on the quality of the fMRI source data, which in turn depends on the performance of the MRI system hardware.

To obtain high quality images, all the subsystems of the MRI system (main magnet, radiofrequency transmit and receive, and gradients) must be operating within very stringent tolerances. This is especially important for the state-of-the-art and bleeding edge research methods being used for high resolution fMRI research, whose requirements are significantly more demanding than those for routine clinical MRI.

The specific objective of this purchase is the acquisition of an independent, comprehensive quality assurance service meeting or exceeding the QA and safety requirements for accreditation by American College of Radiology (ACR accreditation) for FMRIF’s 3T systems, and a comprehensive quality assurance service similar to, and meeting or exceeding the QA and safety requirements for accreditation by American College of Radiology (ACR accreditation) for 1.5T and 3.0T MRI systems, for FMRIF’s 7T systems. A complete system performance evaluation will be performed annually.