A research team at the University of Tsukuba has developed an in-vehicle MRI system that can diagnose sports injuries on the wrist caused by tennis at an early stage.
Early detection and treatment of injuries is extremely important for growing junior athletes at potential risk of sports injuries.One of the most common wrist injuries in sports injuries is damage to the triangular fibrocartilage complex (TFCC).Severe TFCC injury requires surgery, making it difficult to return to competition and may interfere with daily activities.
On the other hand, MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is useful for detecting sports injuries, but general whole-body MRI equipment installed in hospitals is mainly used for patients with high urgency, and sports. It is not practically used for tests aimed at early detection of disorders.
Therefore, in 2019, this team developed an in-vehicle MRI system equipped with a small MRI scanner on an ordinary passenger car.This system was designed for elbow disorders (baseball elbow) and enabled MRI examinations outside the hospital, mainly for junior baseball players.However, the sensitivity is low to acquire an image of the wrist with the same system, and sufficient image quality cannot be obtained. Therefore, it is said that this time, a new system specializing in the above-mentioned wrist sports injury has been developed.
In the wrist MRI system, the diameter of the RF probe that sends and receives nuclear magnetic resonance signals is reduced to fit the wrist, and a stationary shield is provided to reduce external noise in the outdoor environment.Furthermore, by making it possible to operate with a portable generator instead of the conventional commercial power source as a drive source, it has become possible to go to a wider range of environments for inspection.
In fact, when he went to a tennis school and performed an MRI examination of the wrists of 34 junior tennis players, he was able to obtain MRI images with sufficient image quality for diagnosis, and 9 of them found TFCC damage.Since these include asymptomatic, we confirmed that portable MRI examination using this system is effective for early detection and treatment of sports injuries in junior athletes.The team plans to apply it to other parts such as ankles and heels in the future.
Paper information:[Magnetic resonance in medical sciences] Development of a car-mounted mobile MRI system for diagnosis of wrist sports injury
