u/SnickelFritz5000

Wondering if anyone out there can chime in on what your facility’s policies towards “uncleared” stents on 1.5 T machines is.

At two separate facilities where I’ve worked, the policy has been essentially the same: Absolutely no research needed for any cardiac/coronary stents but all other stents need to be researched and cleared.

I’ve been doing some research and digging into the practicality of this policy and slowly realizing that it doesn’t seem to make a ton of sense. Assuming that the stents aren’t super old, so we’ll say placed in 2001 at the very oldest, every single stent you can think of has or more or less the same conditions with most restrictive condition being 2.0 W/kG max whole body SAR.

The primary reason that I’m realizing this policy doesn’t make sense is that while we waive through cardiac stents without batting an eye, I’ve started looking into the specific MRI conditions of a few different newer cardiac stents (placed within the last 5-6 years) and found models that are just as if not slightly more restrictive than non-coronary stents that were placed in the 2000’s / 2010’s (usually just a slightly lower max spatial field gradient in those cases)

So with all that in mind, are there places out there that will waive through non-coronary stents and say “We’ll just keep it on normal mode only for SAR and be fine” if you can at least confirm the stent in question isn’t any older than 2001?