The Houston Methodist Translational Imaging Center provides clinicians and researchers across the Texas Medical Center with access to advanced, high-performance imaging equipment to create a direct translational environment for innovation. Access to such high-throughput multi-modality tools in a translational research setting is seen in very few centers in the world.

Through a Siemens Healthineers and Houston Methodist multi-year consortium agreement, the Research Institute is home to one of the world’s most powerful MRI machines – the Siemens 7 Tesla (7T) MAGNETOM Terra, which is the first 7T MRI of its kind in Texas and the first 7T MRI scanner approved for clinical use in the U.S. This agreement also emphasizes an interventional imaging partnership that allows clinicians and researchers to collaborate on developing new technologies for robotic and image guided navigation.

The higher spatial resolution and improved contrast capabilities of the 7T MRI is being harnessed in clinical studies to more accurately localize the lesions that may be responsible for seizures in epileptic patients with focal cortical dysplasia, the most common cause of medically refractory epilepsy in children and the second/third most common cause of medically intractable seizures in adults. For epilepsy patients who are good candidates for surgery, equipping the surgeon with more detailed information on the lesion sites has the potential to significantly improve surgical outcomes.

Houston Methodist’s collaboration with Siemens is also enabling safer, more autonomous imaging with intracardiac echocardiography or ICE, which allows physicians to focus their efforts and time on delivering therapy rather than dividing their attention with acquiring images. The use of robotic- and AI-assisted ICE imaging may provide simple and intuitive procedural navigation. Chun Huie Lin, MD, PhD, assistant professor of cardiology, is leading an effort to introduce image-based control for semi-autonomous robotic ICE imaging and to optimize the physician-robot interface.

The 7T is also allowing physicians to better monitor patients with small cerebral aneurysms over time and tailor their course of treatment as needed. Traditionally, followup for such patients is conducted with CT angiographic or digital subtraction angiographic examinations. These procedures use radiation and contrast load that pose a risk of renal failure and contrast reactions apart from the risks of cumulative radiation. Although the widely available 3T clinical MRI can circumvent these undesirable effects, it has its own limitations. The 7T clinical MRI scanner may provide a good alternative as its superior spatial resolution and shortened T1 relaxation time of stationary tissue results in superior contrast to blood than current clinical 3T and thereby may prominently display the lumen of the aneurysm and the parent vessel. Experienced endovascular neurosurgeons and neuro- interventional radiologists plan to compare magnetic resonance angiographic images with clinical standard CT angiographic or digital subtraction angiographic acquisitions to determine when the 7T provides a significant advantage.