Case Study: Medrad ensures MRI vascular injection pump safety and reduces design time with MathWorks Model-Based Design

Medrad Ensures Safety of MRI Vascular Injection Pump

Medrad, maker of the Spectris Solaris MRI vascular injection pump, needed to accurately predict the pump’s pressure safety point and improve pressure monitoring while reducing costly hardware prototypes and accelerating development for FDA approval. The team replaced motor-current pressure estimation with strain-gauge sensing and needed to evaluate fixed-point DSP motor controllers and system-level interactions—so they turned to MathWorks tools and Model-Based Design (MATLAB and Simulink) to model the physics and system behavior early in development.

Using MathWorks’ MATLAB, Simulink and toolboxes (Control System, DSP System, Signal Processing, Embedded Coder, and Simulink Real-Time), Medrad modeled each subsystem, tuned motor control loops, designed an RF‑robust filter (saving three weeks), and created hardware-in-the-loop fluid/vascular simulations to cut wet testing. The MathWorks-based approach reduced design time by several months, supported FDA approval, contributed to a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and enabled automatic embedded code generation and higher-quality, faster product development.

Medrad

John F. Kalafut

Senior Research Scientist