7T MRI Scanner in London – acoustic consultancy services

Finch Consulting has been appointed by King’s College London to provide acoustic consultancy services for the new MRI scanner at St Thomas Hospital opposite the Houses of Parliament.

The new scanner’s field strength will be 7T (Tesla named after the Serbian-American pioneer Nikola Tesla), or to put it another way, 140,000 times stronger than the magnetic field of planet Earth itself.

The 7 Tesla scanners are the current most powerful scanners in existence with only a handful in England (Oxford, Cambridge, Nottingham), with one in Wales and another in Scotland.

The unit is manufactured by Siemens, costing around £10m and weighing 18 tonnes. When it is operating, those magnets – but not the patient – will be cooled to minus 269 Celsius.

That is the temperature of deep space. So this particular corner of London will become one of the coldest places in the universe.

Due to its weight, the scanner will be placed on grade at the basement of the hospital, just below the main entrance. The whole area will be remodelled to accommodate the unit.

Since MRI scanners generate high levels of sound pressure when operating the acoustics team at Finch reviewed the noise break out to surrounding noise sensitive areas and proposed enhancements to the architectural build up including the room housing the MRI scanner.