Israeli firm Optoacoustics hopes its state-of-the-art optical headsets will start conversations in the vault during interventional MRIs.

While performing iMRIs -- therapeutic procedures such as biopsies requiring the doctor or radiologist to be present in the vault -- the pounding noise from the machines makes conversation all but impossible. In fact, the roar of an active MRI can reach 120 decibels, making sharing a room with one the equivalent of standing one meter from a jet engine, according to Yuvi Kahana, PhD, CEO of Optoacoustics. Hence, he says, the joke among radiologists that their communication during iMRIs is "optical-digital" -- that is, seeing how many fingers the other doctor is holding up.

But all that might be a thing of the past, if Dr. Kahana's headsets catch on. Based on technology patented by his company in the 1990s, the Interventional MR Optical Communication (IMROC) System uses optical noise-canceling headsets to allow up to eight people -- doctors, patients and control staff -- to communicate throughout the iMRI procedure.
According to Dr. Kahana, the big challenge in designing the headphones was creating a system that allowed up to eight open channels -- without the user being drowned by ambient noise amplified through each microphone into a deafening cacophony.

The fiber-optic headsets work by measuring how light reacts with a membrane that vibrates in response to noise. These measurements are fed from the headset into a central console in the control room that runs an algorithm to intelligently distinguish between background noise and conversation -- thereby dampening up to 30 decibels of background sound, and making conversations among up to eight people clearly audible.

Once the technical hurdle was overcome, there was another, more human problem to face: comfort. "You can have brilliant headphones," says Dr. Kahana, "but it can be too tight, or too loose. You have to come up with a general solution to work with everyone." Dr. Kahana and his team worked with doctors from the National Institutes of Health to develop an ergonomic design meant to be comfortable throughout a typical two-to-six hour iMRI operation.

IMROC is made from MRI-compatible plastics and doesn't use electricity, so it won't interfere with the magnets. "Audio doesn't affect imaging," and vice versa, Dr. Kahana says.

Right now, IMROC is running at four sites in North America, including at specialized MRI suites at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD, and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX. The system will make its official public debut this November in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

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