I think if you _don't_ sell helium to non-recycling facilities in the near term, MRIs would stop altogether. The two articles about recycling that you shared are both research universities who considered it a PR-worthy accomplishment to put recycling in place to cover _some_ of their machines, which for the moment sound like they're almost entirely about NMR; the UCSF article even says that after paying $500k, they're still hoping to "inspire" other uses than NMR within the same university to begin recycling, i.e. the top-flight research university bragging about recycling still isn't able to do it for clinical MRI machines.
Do you know (or perhaps someone else can chime in) -- is it even feasible currently for a medical facility with 1-2 MRI machines to put a recycling system into place? Or is the recycling system of a size and complexity that only if you have a helium footprint above a given size is it realistic? Certainly, most places would not have the expertise on staff to design and implement such a system today.
Worse, if recycling were a requirement to purchase helium, how do we estimate which medical facilities would _not_ buy an MRI machine because of the higher initial cost of the recycling system, or maintenance of its collection, compression, or purification components? How would that change patient outcomes (especially given that the initial complain about MRIs in this thread was long waits due to limited capacity)?
In reply to your other post (I could not comment on it directly)
> ... then is there really still any meaningful relationship between helium supply and the patient wait time for MRIs as westcort complained? Or is it just that there are too few MRI machines in the healthcare system?
The US is second highest in number of MRI machines per capita after Japan. Its probably staffing issues or maybe MRI scans are used much more widely in the US.
I would have expected that since (in my experience) these machines are generally run by a technician, and the MRI itself is relatively quick (a few minutes), and hospitals can bill insurance thousands for an MRI, that once a medical facility has acquired and set up the machine the machine, that running patients through should more than pay for the time of staff immediately involved.
Thanks for pointing at that!
But if the description is correct,
> ZBO magnets allow practically unlimited
system operation without helium refill.
... then is there really still any meaningful relationship between helium supply and the patient wait time for MRIs as westcort complained? Or is it just that there are too few MRI machines in the healthcare system?
And, I suppose if anyone here knows -- why is it that NMR magnets at UCLA and UCSF required recycling systems which sound meaningfully less efficient (the UCLA article linked above reclaimed only 90%) rather than using the ZBO tech which is apparently standard in modern MRIs?
Do you know (or perhaps someone else can chime in) -- is it even feasible currently for a medical facility with 1-2 MRI machines to put a recycling system into place? Or is the recycling system of a size and complexity that only if you have a helium footprint above a given size is it realistic? Certainly, most places would not have the expertise on staff to design and implement such a system today.
Worse, if recycling were a requirement to purchase helium, how do we estimate which medical facilities would _not_ buy an MRI machine because of the higher initial cost of the recycling system, or maintenance of its collection, compression, or purification components? How would that change patient outcomes (especially given that the initial complain about MRIs in this thread was long waits due to limited capacity)?