Thesis Project Form

Designing a new hospital involves technology choices that will shape diagnostic capacity, operating costs and clinical workflows for decades. Among these, the choice of the magnetic field strength for the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) system to be installed - 1.5 Tesla, 3 Tesla, or a combination of the two - is particularly critical: it does not only concern technical performance (signal-to-noise ratio, artifacts, acquisition times), but also affects clinical indications, radioprotection, site requirements, and both capital and operating costs.
This choice is currently often made on a case-by-case basis, driven by local practice or budget constraints, without an explicit and reproducible model that systematically integrates technical, clinical, economic and regulatory factors. The Liguria Region is planning or building new hospital facilities, which provide a concrete testbed for validating such a model.

The aim of the thesis is to identify a set of decision criteria, designed to be generalizable to any hospital setting (“universal”), able to guide the choice between 1.5T and 3T MRI when designing a new hospital, and to validate them on selected case studies of new hospitals in Liguria.
In particular, the student will:
• Technical framework: systematically compare 1.5T and 3T in terms of SNR, SAR, susceptibility and chemical-shift artifacts, acquisition times, and installation requirements;
• Clinical framework: review the indications for which 3T provides a genuine diagnostic advantage versus contexts where 1.5T remains preferable or sufficient;
• Legislative and regulatory framework: analyze Italian and European regulations on electromagnetic field radioprotection, healthcare authorization procedures for installation and operation, and relevant technical standards;
• Economic analysis: estimate capital and operating costs associated with the two options;
• Build a multi-criteria decision model that integrates the above factors, with explicit and reproducible weights;
• Apply and validate the model on case studies of new hospitals being planned or built in Liguria, including through consultation with domain professionals (medical physicists, radiologists, clinical engineers, technical planning offices).

Over the course of the proposed thesis, the student will learn and apply the following skills:
• Elements of physics and clinical engineering applied to Magnetic Resonance Imaging;
• Elements of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) and healthcare decision support;
• Multi-criteria decision analysis methods;
• Elements of healthcare regulation and radioprotection applied to large diagnostic equipment;
• Elements of hospital facility planning and design.