Construction Update:
Building a Home for the 7-tesla 

As part of its strategic partnership with Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., the Medical Center has begun to receive the first of some 100 state-of-the-art imaging machines that will be installed in various parts of the campus over several years.
The crown jewel of the collection, the 7-tesla MRI, is scheduled to be up and running by fall 2004. This highly anticipated machine will be housed in the new Center for Biomedical Imaging at 660 First Avenue, along with two 3-tesla MRIs and a high-speed, high-resolution computed tomography (CT) scanner.

The forthcoming 7-tesla MRI has a magnet that weighs 30 tons, but the layers of steel required to shield surrounding areas from its mighty electromagnetic field (shown in background above) total some 420 tons. As the installation of the one-foot-thick shield was recently completed on the ground floor of 660 First Avenue, Joseph Helpern, Ph.D., Director of the Center for High Field MR Research, toured the cavelike setting that will become the home of one of the most powerful MRI machines in the world.

With a pull some 140,000 times stronger than that of the Earth’s magnetic field, the 7-tesla magnet is so powerful that it requires special steel shielding to prevent its electromagnetic energy from causing interference and to ensure safety. So large is the magnet’s field that, without the 32-foot-long, 18-foot-diameter shield, it would attract metal objects within a surrounding area of 17,000 square feet, posing a physical safety risk to people within the building, wreaking havoc on technology, and even demagnetizing the credit cards of passersby on First Avenue.

With the help of the 7-tesla, researchers will be able to image the body’s functions with unprecedented detail, enabling them to study metabolism in action, for example, or the movement of chemicals used to transmit nerve signals.

Meanwhile, in the basement of the Schwartz Health Care Center (HCC), the first Avanto MRI to be manufactured by Siemens has been installed. Other machines require that the position of the magnetic coils be changed to image different body parts, but the Avanto has a matrix of coils that covers the entire body at once.
The Faculty Practice Radiology facilities on the second floor of HCC are being extensively renovated to accommodate new equipment, including X-ray machines, fluoroscopes, and CT scanners, one of which is designed for cardiac studies—its imaging speed is fast enough to capture the motion of a beating heart. Construction is scheduled for completion this summer.

In the radiology and nuclear medicine suites on the second floor of Tisch Hospital, construction is under way to accommodate a variety of new machines. Some of the equipment has already been replaced, and the roll-out will continue over the next two and a half years.

Smilow Research Center
Construction of the School of Medicine’s Joan and Joel Smilow Research Center is on schedule, with the building expected to be occupied by the end of 2005. Pile driving has been completed and excavation is continuing, with the erection of structural steel for the 13-story building scheduled for completion at the end of 2004.