Getting an MRI is miserable. You lie still in a claustrophobic tube while loud magnets bang around you. At Amsterdam's Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital, that ordeal just got 14 minutes shorter.
The cancer center has cut MRI scan times from 23 minutes to 9 using AI-powered image reconstruction developed with Philips Healthcare. The software predicts what should appear in undersampled scan data, so radiologists can get diagnostic-quality images without running as many passes.
The hospital now fits 18 additional scans into regular daytime hours instead of pushing them to evenings or weekends.
Speed also improves quality. Radiologist Doenja Lambregts told RTL that longer scans suffer from motion blur because patients can't stay perfectly still, and breathing and heartbeat add more noise. "You can't tell your intestines to stay still," she said. Faster scans mean less time for any of that motion to show up in the final image.
Before deployment, staff members got scanned with both old and new systems to verify reliability. The Netherlands Cancer Institute works closely with Philips on AI imaging tools like SmartSpeed and Compressed SENSE, which use neural networks to fill in missing data.