Lantheus Medical Imaging is a worldwide leader in medical imaging, with headquarters in North Billerica, Massachusetts, and nearly 700 employees worldwide with offices in Puerto Rico, Canada, and Australia.
The product portfolio includes ABLAVAR™ (gadofosveset trisodium) a blood pool contrast agent for magnetic resonance angiography MRA, Cardiolite® (Kit for the preparation of Technetium Tc99m Sestamibi), a cardiac perfusion imaging agent and DEFINITY® Vial for (Perflutren Lipid Microsphere) injectable suspension, the leading cardiac ultrasound contrast agent in the US.

MRI Contrast Agents:

Forces can result from the interaction of magnetic fields. Pulsed magnetic field gradients can interact with the main magnetic field during the MRI scan, to produce acoustic noise through the gradient coil.
Magnetic fields attract ferromagnetic objects with forces, which can be a lethal danger if one is hit by an unrestrained object in flight. One could also be trapped between the magnet and a large unrestrained ferromagnetic object or the object could damage the MRI machine.
Access control and personnel awareness are the best preventions of such accidents. The attraction mechanism for ferromagnetic objects is that the magnetic field magnetizes the iron. This induced magnetization reacts with the gradient of the magnetic field to produce an attraction toward the strongest area of the field. The details of this interaction are very dependent on the shape and composition of the attracted object. There is a very rapid increase of force as one approaches a magnet. There is also a torque or twisting force on objects, e.g. a long cylinder (such as a pen or an intracranial aneurysm clip) will tend to align along the magnet's field lines. The torque increases with field strength while the attraction increases with field gradient.
Depending on the magnetic saturation of the object, attraction is roughly proportional to object mass. Motion of conducting objects in magnetic fields can induce eddy currents that can have the effect of opposing the motion.

See also Duty Cycle.

See also the related poll result: 'Most outages of your scanning system are caused by failure of'

Founded in June 1997, ONI was a privately held company headquartered in Wilmington, Massachusetts. ONI was focused on addressing the new healthcare economics by delivering the next generation of MRI machines: high field, low cost dedicated purpose systems. The company's first offering was the OrthOne™. Further developments lead to the MSK Extreme™, a 1.0 Tesla dedicated purpose MR system with v-SPEC™ Technology and DICOM Conformance for extremity applications.
In October 2009 GE Healthcare bought ONI Medical Systems for US$ 17 Billion.

MRI Scanners:

1.0T:

A limitation of abdominal MRI can be the assessment of malignancies by difficulties to distinguish bowel from other organs or malignant masses. The use of oral contrast agents can reduce this problem. Properties of an ideal oral contrast agent are little or no absorption by the stomach or intestines, complete excretion, no motion or susceptibility artifacts, and uniform marking of the GI tract.
Gastrointestinal MRI contrast agents are divided in materials with bright appearance or dark appearance. The choice of a negative or a positive oral contrast agent depends on the specific problem or the pulse sequence.

See also Positive Oral Contrast Agents, Negative Oral Contrast Agents, Gastrointestinal Diamagnetic Contrast Agents, Gastrointestinal Paramagnetic Contrast Agents and Gastrointestinal Superparamagnetic Contrast Agents.

See also the related poll result: 'The development of contrast agents in MRI is'