The MRI procedure itself, however, can take nearly an hour to be performed and is extremely tedious for the one having the procedure done, considering they must be laying flat for the entire time. Because of all the negatives with the MRI as whole, people have tried to find solutions to those issues. The idea of the MRI is brilliant, but there are still aspects that could be fixed to make the process easier to all parties.
Richard Baraniuk and Kevin Kelly, faculty at Rice University, discovered "compressive scanning" in order to speed up the MRI process to just seconds, as opposed to nearly an hour. The compressive scanning is used only for the scans of a beating heart, but possibly could evolve to scan even more. The process of a compressive scan requires the patient to breathe normally throughout the procedure whilst the heart is being scanned. The future of compressive scanning is unknown, but the technology has already gained popularity. Siemens Medical Solutions has licensed the technology discovered by Baraniuk and Kelly, which already shows the desire for the product. MRI scans continue to be performed daily and with the time for the procedures cut down drastically, the future for MRI scans seems only brighter.
sources: phys.org dsp.rice.edu
As someone who has had to sit in an MRI machine for a couple of hours to get a single knee scanned I can hope for others that this process may speed up in the future. I also have a friend who's brother needed many brain MRI's and herself needed many hip MRI's. I remember hearing from her about the wait lines and her brother panicking in the machine because he felt claustrophobic in it.
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