BROCKTON — Once known for technological breakthroughs like Thomas Edison’s three-wire electrical system, Brockton hosted a new “first” on Wednesday.
Workers craned a state-of-the-art, 13,000-pound MRI machine into Shields Health’s flagship Brockton location. It’s the first MRI of its type in the Northeast, according to General Electric and Shields Health.
Named the Hero in honor of front-line medical personnel, the magnetic resonance imaging machine dramatically cuts the time patients must stay inside the clacking, whirring, claustrophobia-inducing device. A prostate scan that took 46 minutes with the facility’s old machine is over in just 15 minutes with the new one, according to estimates from Shields Health. The image quality is sharper, too, said Peter Ferrari, president of Shields Health.
“You think about the anxiety that a patient has sitting on the table. ‘Don’t move.’ The loud noises,” Ferrari said. “It’s one thing to equip yourself for a 45-minute scan where you have to kind of be braced for it. Knowing that it’s going to be 15 minutes changes your preparation, how we think about it, how the patient thinks about it, and then the images are better, which is fantastic.”