TE News: Prevent Interference in Medical Imaging Environments

TE Connectivity (TE), a world leader in connectivity and sensors, now offers special electromagnetic interference (EMI) filters for use in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) rooms where Class II drivers are used to power LED lighting.

These new TE filters are part of the Corcom family of products, which are highly-engineered, sealed assemblies of electrical filtering components that eliminate unwanted electrical magnetic interference. With the new Corcom filters for LED lighting in MRI rooms, room light manufacturers can offer high-efficiency, patient-centric lighting while safeguarding against electrical interference risk to the MRI equipment’s functionality and output that may be caused by LED lights.

“The filters are compatible with 40V, 3A drivers and are an excellent choice for high-noise drivers and their compact size supports OEM’s and installers in their drive to minimize the size and weight of their equipment,” says Jose Diaz, global product manager at TE Connectivity. “The assemblies are soldered and fully shielded to protect the filters against radiated noise. The unit comes with a high quality steel mesh guard on the insert pipe that protects the MRI room from external radiated noise and EZ connect terminals for fast set-up and install. These products will be sold through TE’s extensive distribution network making it easy for Industrial and lighting designers, installers, and facility managers to purchase this product. The options we offer provide solutions for many situations and price sensibilities.”

MRI rooms have to meet stringent electrical noise requirements, as it can interfere with the superconducting magnets within the MRI equipment, causing it to produce incorrect, or flawed data. All electrical equipment within the MRI room must be supplied with “clean” power.  LED lighting is increasingly preferred in these medical environments for its lifetime cost, operation and aesthetic benefits, but manufacturers, installers and building engineers still must guard against electrical “noise” from the LED lighting’s power supplies and control equipment.

Drivers power the light fixtures and, through their PWM (pulse width modulated) outputs, may introduce EMI interference within the MRI room. TE’s new MRI LED filters are intended to be installed outside the shielded MRI rooms, cleaning the electrical power that originates in the drivers before it gets inside the MRI room and powers the LED lights. The filter design can attenuate noise within the bandpass frequencies between 10 KHz and 1GHz. It uses a powerful three-stage bandpass circuit to bring insertion loss down to -100dB.  The MRI LED line of Corcom filters complement TE’s market-leading MRI2030 and MRI2030R products, which are renowned for their quality and reliability in providing clean power to the other electrical devices in an MRI room.

The filters, which can be retrofitted to existing equipment, come in versions with two, three and four channels, providing OEM lighting manufacturers the scalability they need in developing light fixtures for their customers.  This scalability also provides contractors with the flexibility to choose the correct number of filters for each installation.  The professionals who build and install MRI rooms and environmental lighting take great care to ensure noise is eliminated, and that the MRI equipment manufacturers’ tests and protocols are met assuring safe operation of the equipment.

TE Connectivity also offers customer engineering teams EMI/RF testing and compliance assurance services at several labs around the world.