Staff at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital this week celebrated the first anniversary of the facility?s state-of-the-art Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine.

Hundreds of Bermuda residents have benefited from the machine?s presence ? having been spared the inconvenience of travelling overseas for the procedure.

?We have had over 1,700 cases with a vast majority of those being studies of patients? spines, large joints and brains,? Diagnostic Imaging director Dr. Daniel Stovell told this week.

Celebrating along with Dr. Stovell was new MRI clinical director Dr. Stephen Witchell and Dr. David Yousem, the director of neuro-radiology of Johns Hopkins Medical Centre in Baltimore, who is in Bermuda to give a series of lectures for technologists and radiologists at KEMH.

?This new machine has had a very good reception with doctors being very pleased that this technology is available locally,? Dr. Stovell said. ?After a year of having it, I?m sure that local doctors wouldn?t know what to do without it now,? he said.

Dr. Witchell said the lengthy process to buy the $2.5 million MRI machine was definitely worth it.

It was in 1993 when he visited KEMH to give a lecture on MRI technology when he first learned of the Bermuda Hospitals Board?s interest in purchasing a machine.

The process took ten years but in the end that may have been just as well.

?If we had bought a machine five or seven years ago it would have been obsolete by now,? said Dr. Witchell, adding that an older MRI would have been far more limited for diagnostic purposes.?

He said the model at KEMH makes fiscal sense since it can be upgraded.

?Any facility in the world would be happy to have this machine,? Dr. Yousem added.

Used by radiologists to diagnose and monitor conditions ranging from multiple sclerosis, neurological disorders, joint diseases, sports-related injuries and cancer, the MRI machine uses magnetic signals as opposed to X-rays to create images of the body?s tissues. Images are created while a patient is lying in an open-ended capsule, with the only possible discomfort resulting from the loud knocking sound created by the super conductor magnet which generates the images.

Before the MRI machine arrived in December, 2002, patients were forced to fly off the Island in order to be scanned. This was a costly measure and one, Dr. Stovell added, that would often cause major discomfort for patients suffering from conditions such as back injuries.

Since the machine has been available in Bermuda, there has been a marked increase in the number of cases. ?The biggest benefit is that now that the service is available more doctors can have it done for their patients.?

But that has also resulted in a backlog of patients waiting for an MRI.

Admitting that during the past year the wait for an MRI reached up to eight weeks, Dr. Stovell said that a patient?s wait time was now down to a maximum of 12 days. ?Our technologists have cut studies down from one hour to 30 minutes per study over the past year,? he said, attributing the reduced study time to the increased comfort of the local technologists with the scanning procedure.

Dr. Witchell, who joined the hospital?s full time staff last November, said that his department is making an effort to ensure that the wait time never reaches more than two weeks.

Dr. Witchell also said that the hospital will soon be able to handle all local MRI requirements.

?There were not any full-time MRI radiologists until just recently,? said Dr. Witchell, who had been the visiting KEMH ad locum for several years.

A second radiologist ? Dr. Rajah Kappala ? was added recently.

According to Dr. Witchell, KEMH has been phasing out the need to send the images abroad for a foreign radiologist to provide a diagnosis.

?Within 60 days we will be providing Bermuda with 99 percent of the services needed,? he said.

But Dr. Yousem said that KEMH?s long affiliation with Johns Hopkins? radiology unit would not be ended with an autonomous MRI unit.

He said that patients in Bermuda would be able to send their images abroad electronically using a private network and Johns Hopkins? radiologists would almost instantly be able to offer a valuable second opinion on difficult cases.