Towards MRI Greening: Sequence-Specific Energy Profiles and Sustainable Cooling Solutions Using Waste Heat Recovery

Motivation: Possible sequence and hardware optimizations should be explored to reduce the inherently high energy consumption of MR imaging. Goal(s): Report the power required for different MRI sequences and successful measures implemented at our institution to reduce overall energy consumption by the MRI. Approach: Instantaneous power was measured by contact-free current and voltage probes. Waste heat utilization and guidelines avoiding standby mode were implemented. Results: The energy consumption strongly depended on the sequence type. The measures resulted in a reduction of CO2-equ of over 9500kg per year. Impact: Given the pressing need for reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions world-wide, our work presents insights on how to tackle it in MRI without compromising on the image quality or patient experience.