The U.S. Navy, Army and Air Force Medical Departments are moving expeditiously with a great sense of urgency to field an unprecedented Magnetic Resonance Imaging Machine (MRI) capability for our forces in Afghanistan as part of an overall comprehensive approach to diagnosing and treating concussive injuries on the battlefield despite the claims made recently by USA Today (No MRIs To The Rescue Yet For War-Zone Brain Injuries, USA Today, April 15, 2011).
I and my fellow Surgeons General remain fully supportive of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ initiative to send MRIs to Afghanistan to help our wounded personnel cope with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). We recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan to meet with all the senior military medical and line leadership in the region to discuss the challenges of fielding this capability in depth. This is a complex and unprecedented acquisition issue and we are working hard to push the system to field this equipment as soon as possible while ensuring it will do the job we intend it to do while operating in a combat theater.
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