Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have redesigned a wire that connects to implanted medical devices, reducing the heat generated from the wire during MRI scans.
The redesigned wire is at the core of leads that carry signals between implanted medical devices and their target structures. The new wire generates less heat than standard wires when exposed to the radiofrequency (RF) energy used in MRI. The new technology is described in a paper published in Scientific Reports (April 29, 2015).
The wire was designed by MGH's Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and uses resistive tapered stripline (RTS) technology, which breaks up the RF-induced current increase by using an abrupt change in the electrical conductivity of wires made from conductive polymers.
Compared with a commercially available lead, the RTS lead generated less than half of the heat produced by exposure to a powerful MRI-RF field, which is well within current U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) limits, according to a press release from MGH.
