DRMC Buys New MRI Machine
The Danville Regional Medical Center
welcomes a
new $1.5 million imaging machine that is
expected to be operational within two weeks.
By John Hale
Register & Bee staff writer
Danville, VA - If $1.5 million seems like too much
money to spend on new hospital equipment, consider the
alternative - losing patients to Duke University Medical
Center or Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.
The Danville Regional Medical Center has purchased
a new magnetic resonance imaging machine that could
hold the key to the future of open heart surgeries at
the facility.
“One point five million, yeah, I can retire withthat,“
the hospital’s division director for radiology Gerald
Johnson said Monday. “You pay for technology because
you have to pay for the research and development that
goes into it.”
Work crews on Monday moved the machine into the hospital
through a removable cap in the roof. The unit is expected
to be operational within two weeks, Johnson said.
The hospital already had a MRI machine, but it was
in the wall and closed at the end.
Patients suffered severe claustrophobic bouts that
required the hospital to send some of its patients to
the nearby outpatient center.
 There,
they have an open MRI machine that is more comfortable
to the patients but lacks the level of quality necessary
for detection of organ and blood vessel problems.
“The biggest question everybody asks us is, “Why
didn’t we get an open magnet?” Computed
Tomography and MRI coordinator Sandra Bayes said. “The
answer is simple; the closed magnet gives better images.
An open MRI operates something like a tanning bed,
while the new Siemens 1.5 Tesla symphony has a donut-shaped
magnet that scans over the body.
The older version that the hospital is replacing had
a hard bed that slid on a track into a wall and was
completely enclosed.
“Claustrophobia was the biggest problem, “Bayes
said.
The new unit will allow heavier patients to be scanned
as well.
The potential of the new machine, in conjunction with
operations at the hospital’s Heart Center of the
Piedmont, is exciting to Bayes and Johnson.
Johnson said he looks forward to a day when they can
observe a heart beating through imaging.
Bayes also keeps an eye to the past, bidding the 6 year
old unit a good riddance. 
It's already gone,” she said.
“They sent it back to Siemens, and Siemens will
probably send it to some Third World country,”
Johnson said.
To install the unit, a 12-man team that exclusively
installs the units for Siemens used a crane to lower
the machine through a hole in the roof.
“We had a hole in the roof,” Johnson said.
“When we built the building, we had a removable
cap.”
To protect from too much sunlight, a filtering system
keeps the ultraviolet light from flooding the room.
“The skylight is good for the atmosphere of the
room,” Bayes said. “It opened it up and
put a whole lot more light in there.”
Contact John Hale at jhale@registerbee.com or at (434)
793-2311, ext. 3047
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