To a patient, “exploratory surgery” is a frightening concept. It conjures images of doctors foraging through a patient’s insides, searching for the cause of a mysterious ailment. Worst of all, the patient may wake up to a dreaded diagnosis in addition to a new scar.
Charles Springer, Ph.D. wants to eliminate the need for exploratory surgery, essentially replacing the scalpel with a digital image as a diagnostic tool.
As director of OHSU’s Advanced Imaging Research Center, Springer is overseeing an effort to develop new forms of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for use in research and treatment of patients. “Over the past couple of decades, remarkable and rapid technological advancements in this field have provided us noninvasive windows into the body, essentially making exploratory surgery a thing of the past,” he said.
The Advanced Imaging Research Center is located in the Biomedical Research Building at OHSU. It houses some of the most cutting-edge MRI technology, including a 12 Tesla (T) magnet with a magnetic field 120,000 times stronger than that of the Earth – one of only two of its kind in the world.
"This state-of-the-art 12 T system will provide some of the clearest, and likely some of the most useful, images in the history of MRI science," said Springer.
