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Amanda Linton’s four-year-old daughter Adeline has had several MRIs at CHEO since she was a baby, and she needed general anesthesia each time.
That meant days off work for a procedure that required more than three hours in hospital. The procedure itself is not easy on a child either: fasting beforehand, inserting a breathing tube in their airway during the MRI, and then grogginess from the medication as part of the recovery.
The wait-list for an MRI with general anesthesia could have also forced the family to wait more than a year for Adeline’s latest scan as they seek answers for her neurological challenges.
Enter MRI technologist Matt Head, the man behind a new CHEO clinic set to open at the end of March.
Head works with kids and uses a very important tool: a virtual reality (VR) headset that is far more enjoyable than general anesthesia.
The headset was created by Montreal-based Paperplane Therapeutics, giving a child the opportunity to take control of the experience by playing games and previewing what it's like to go through with an MRI.
Initially, the clinic will focus on head MRIs — they take less time — for children four and older who have trouble undergoing an MRI without general anesthesia, whether due to their age or anxiety.
Head’s work began as a pilot project in the fall of 2023 and Adeline was one of the first children to try it out.
"I can't believe that it actually worked,” said her mom, Amanda. “I didn't think that it was going to be possible.”
The MRI captured all the necessary images of Adeline’s brain. During the pilot, 17 other children also went through with successful MRIs.
“The technology is a tool that our staff at CHEO, our pediatric MRI technologists, are using to empower those families and give the kids the confidence, give them the skillset,” said Head.
The pilot project helped these kids get their scans sooner while avoiding the MRI general anesthesia wait-list.
That success helped spark the new, innovative clinic, which was made possible thanks to a historic investment of $40.5 million by the Ontario government to CHEO last summer.
“They’ve just given us that opportunity to do what we can do best,” Head said of the funding, which helped the clinic — among other things — purchase the VR headset.
Along with this new clinic, CHEO has also added a short-notice cancellation list and an extra appointment on Wednesdays to shorten wait times.
Head said MRI technologists in the clinic take their time during an hourlong one-on-one appointment to work with a child and family to build a trusting relationship.
If the child is comfortable, a 30-minute time slot for an MRI follows a week later.
“There’s no time crunch. We’re working with you. We’re completely dedicated to your child and you, and we’re going to give you the best experience possible,” he said.
Amanda Linton said Adeline felt comfortable before and during the MRI of her head, which lasted about 20 minutes.
“They did a great job. They talked her through it and then they made it fun,” she said.
The headset helps prepare a child and the reward, said Head, is the TV show they can watch during the real MRI.