MINNEAPOLIS — To put it in simple terms, there's some cool stuff happening on the Minneapolis campus of Children's Minnesota.
This winter, the hospital is unveiling a new intraoperative MRI (iMRI) suite — a three-room, 2,970-square-foot facility — fueled by $4 million in donations from the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation.
In one room sits an MRI scanner, which has the capability to move into an adjacent operating room, or stay grounded and have patients from a separate adjacent OR wheeled toward the machine. When the suite opens next month, Children's Minnesota claims it will become the "the first pediatric health system in North America with an iMRI suite equipped with both moving-scanner and moving-patient MRI technology in the same surgical space."
Dr. Kyle Halvorson, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Children's Minnesota, gave KARE 11 an inside look at the technology on Thursday.
"This is awesome. This is really every neurosurgeon's dream," Halvorson said. "These are the kinds of things we'd like to see in a five to 10 year plan. We have it right now."
The iMRI suite will give Children's Minnesota unprecedented flexibility, allowing staff to conduct brain scans on a child in the middle of surgery and juggle multiple patients.
Halvorson gave an example of how this might work. In one operating room, a child could be in surgery getting cranial imaging, while in the other OR, a child undergoing an operation for a spinal cord tumor could get imaging on that tumor once the first patient finished with the MRI machine.
The setup prevents Children's Minnesota from having to transfer patients to other parts of the hospital for an MRI.
"We never leave the room. The anesthesiologists are right there with us. There's no risk of going from sterile to unsterile," Halvorson said. "There is a much more efficient use of time. This situation, we feel, is far safer."
Halvorson said the first surgery in the new suite is scheduled for March.
"This is really new modern technology, that makes Children's Minnesota very fortunate to have it here," Halvorson said. "Not only the interoperative MRI suite, but the fact that in this room, we have the next-level tech to provide the safest, most functional, most efficient surgeries for these kids."
The Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation has also started a fundraising challenge through the rest of the calendar year. If the community donates $1.5 million to the Children's Minnesota suite and neurosciences program, the foundation has promised to match those funds.
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