A carbon-neutral radiology department is the ultimate goal of a new collaboration between Siemens Healthineers and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in a project designed to reduce the environmental impact of medical imaging.
Healthcare is responsible for up to 5% of carbon emissions around the world, according to Dr. Christopher Hess, PhD, chair of UCSF's department of radiology and biomedical imaging. The project is part of an initiative to find a way to reduce radiology's environmental footprint, he said in a statement.
The initiative is called Green Radiology and is a collaboration between UCSF, Siemens AG USA, and Siemens Healthineers. It will track the power consumption of imaging equipment at UCSF with Siemens' Smart Infrastructure platform; develop artificial intelligence (AI) for radiology, clinical data and image integration, and quantitative imaging; and install Siemens' Magnetom Free.Max MRI scanner, which uses less helium than other systems, Siemens and UCSF said.
