A surgeon in Electromedicine.

The repair of the damaged block at a time when the country does not have the financing to acquire it, represents a guarantee for the continuity of the service, as well as a saving, since this part alone costs around 55,000 euros.

In his 23 years at the provincial Center for Clinical Engineering and Electromedicine, Fernando Maden Hernández has put into operation a lot of vital equipment to ensure specialized care in health centers in the province of Matanzas.

For him and his colleagues, ingenuity is raw material. Thus, from knowledge, they perform «surgeries», measure here, correct there, until they get the availability of broken, obsolete technologies, thrown away in any other country, not in Cuba.

Nothing more eloquent than the Science and Technology Base Forum (FBCT). In a score of works, everything takes on an unusual value if one thinks of the preserved existence, the treatment to improve the quality of life of a patient, in an accurate diagnosis.

That desire was inspiration, leverage, urgency for Orlando Gonzalez, Mario Aguilar and Maden, who learned that the Magneton C Resonance Imaging (MRI), the only one in the province, stopped adjusting the frequency and this interrupted its services at the Faustino Perez Hospital.

«We detected that one of the gradient power protectors (breakes), the one in the Y module, had tripped, which indicated a power failure; that’s why it was not working properly. As the Siemens company no longer has parts to supply us, they authorized us to check it, only if we were capable…».

They set to work. «We opened up the power supply side and noticed open diode bridges… They provided us with a broken module from another piece of equipment to recover a component known as Mofets.

«It was encouraging to see that there was no cut-off and when fully assembled it set the frequency correctly. The solution was accurate enough to achieve the images». After the adaptation, orondo says, the team has not stopped working with optimal parameters.

Maden and his colleagues were awarded the category of Relevant, the highest awarded in the forums. While explaining the work, he said: «There is no greater prize than the joy of having solved the problem as quickly as we could. It was detained for only a week,» he explained, and also recalled the days in 2008 when the MRI was first installed.

The Faustino Pérez Hospital is grateful for this. The MRI service performs an average of almost 20 examinations per day and studies about 130 patients per week, including those from the nearby territory of Mayabeque.

The repair of the damaged block at a time when the country does not have the financing to acquire a new one, represents a guarantee for the continuity of the service, as well as a considerable saving, since that part alone costs around 55,000 Euros.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique developed within the framework of radiology and nuclear medicine to investigate the anatomy and physiology of the body.

It can be used to detect tumors, inflammation, neurological conditions such as stroke, muscle and joint disorders. In high-field MRI, abnormalities in the heart and blood vessels, among other pathologies, can be detected.

Photo by the author.

Written by Eva Luna Acosta Armiñán.