Local medical charity Cobalt have just completed a major comprehensive software and hardware upgrade of their entire mobile fleet of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners, improving imaging quality for doctors and scanning times and comfort for patients.

As well as cancer, the charity’s equipment is able to assist in the detection of illnesses such as dementia including Alzheimer’s disease.

The upgrade included software and hardware and will help the charity to continue its objective to always provide the latest technology ensuring imaging equipment remains current and able to support the latest requirements.

The MRI equipment costs the Charity millions to purchase and maintain and such upgrades take place regularly. The Charity are supported by suppliers as well as a dedicated on-site engineer provided by Philips.

Karen Hackling-Searle, Head of MRI at Cobalt said “Upgrades like this are cost effective, they extend the life of the equipment which ensures good value for the charity.

“This particular upgrade was to standardise the software platform and scanning capabilities across all the MRI systems. This will improve ease of use for the radiographers carrying out the scans as well as enabling us to offer new scanning techniques.

“These new techniques allow better visualisation of tissues around implants or devices which may be present in the area of the body to be scanned”.

The charity provide diagnostic imaging for over 75,000 patients at Cobalt Imaging Centre in Cheltenham, the ITM Imaging Centre in Birmingham and with a fleet of mobile MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and CT (Computed Tomography) scanners that travel throughout the UK.