Canon Medical Systems and Manchester United are celebrating ten years of sports medicine and imaging partnership by extending their agreement, ensuring the continued provision of specialist diagnostic imaging equipment, supporting proactive and reactive imaging delivery for its professional male and female footballers.
Since 2013 Canon Medical Systems’ equipment at the Club’s Carrington Training Complex has ensured the continuity of specialist cardiac, musculoskeletal (MSK) and general sports medicine using the most advanced systems available. As part of the partnership extension Canon Medical Systems will provide upgrades to the existing range of Healthcare IT (HIT), CT, MRI and Ultrasound diagnostic imaging systems to advance the level of care that can be provided to players and enhance ongoing research projects that will benefit wider global patient communities.
Altivity, Canon Medical’s deep learning & machine learning AI powered technologies, will be included in the upgrade to the existing Vantage Galan 3T MRI via Canon Medical’s Advanced intelligent Clear-IQ Engine (AiCE). This will improve the clarity and detail in the resulting image outputs providing a greater level of information for sports medicine interpretation and clinical decision making. With the ability to combine with 2D and 3D Compressed SPEEDER it can further accelerate the speed of MRI scanning giving swift imaging results. AiCE offers the clarity and quality that can, in some cases, be comparable to that of high-end 7 Tesla systems.
Sequence enhancements for improved MRI workflow will also be applied to improve the acquisition of dynamic, high-quality images. The Vitrea Enterprise system will be enhanced with cutting edge MRI image analysis software packages as well as an MRI and Ultrasound fusion navigation package, helping to examine muscle and tendons simultaneously improving the understanding of MSK injuries.
Mark Hitchman, Managing Director of Canon Medical Systems UK states, “This extension to our capacity as ‘Official Medical Systems Partner’ to Manchester United will take our long-term relationship to even greater depths. Together, for over a decade, we have helped support proactive and reactive imaging for injury prevention, identification and rehabilitation to help have a positive impact on player availability and care.”
He continues, ”Key advancements that the imaging systems have helped expand include the important introduction of annual cardiac screening of all players from the Academy youth teams upwards to proactively check for heart abnormalities, which is essential for elite athletes under high physical pressure to pre-empt, for example, sudden cardiac arrest. Also included is a programme of exploratory work into diagnosing and monitoring for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a brain condition that can be caused by repeated blows to the head and repeated concussion; and finally further research projects with academia to develop knowledge beyond sports into areas such as congenital heart disease. The success of these initiatives is reliant on harnessing the power and productivity of medical imaging innovations.”
Victoria Timpson, CEO of Alliances and Partnerships at Manchester United states, “Player care and performance is incredibly important at Manchester United, across all of our teams and age groups, so having a partnership with a leading medical systems innovator who understands this and can deliver the most advanced range of diagnostic imaging systems is a huge advantage. . By continuing our relationship with Canon Medical Systems, we can ensure our men’s, women’s and academy players have access to the very best standard of care from the most advanced medical systems on the market at our on-site dedicated Medical Imaging Centre, the Carrington Training Complex. ”