Hand-held, accessible scanning

Magnetic resonance imaging can image soft tissue safely at millimeter accuracy, but the equipment to do so is expensive and bulky, and requires specialized workflows. These factors have kept MR imaging out of the primary care clinic. Now, Jacob White, Cecil H. Green Professor in Electrical Engineering, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Elfar Adalsteinsson are developing a hand-held MR scanner (HHMRS) that will cost less than $1000.

Their HHMRS will produce axial images of tissue in a small-diameter thin slice—like the cross-section of an arm or a leg, for instance. Crucially, that image will be updated fast enough to track the scanner in real-time. So instead of a primary care physician referring a patient to a radiology specialist who uses a machine weighing more than a ton and costing more than $100,000, the physician could use the proposed HHMRS—100 times lighter and 100 times cheaper—to hunt for regions of interest in tissue in the same way they might use a stethoscope to listen the heart and lungs or an ultrasound wand to check on fetal health.

Inspired by recent experiments in tabletop MR imaging, the researchers wanted to go even further.

“We thought that if we redesigned the electronics using off-the-shelf parts, developed an easily assembled open-air magnet, and kept the cost to a few hundred dollars, we could create an open-source imager anyone could build and use to image their finger,” say White and Adalsteinsson. “We hoped this would inspire students worldwide to get involved in designing MR imaging hardware, and lead to broader access.”

A new community of users

Much of the MR imaging community is focused on improving the quality of MR imaging and developing a better understanding of the brain through MRI, White and Adalsteinsson note. As a result, there has been less interest in and funding for a smaller but more accessible scanner. The researchers have made steady progress toward an excellent educational imager without that funding, but they are ready to take the next step. The Bose funding will help them create an open-source HHMRS platform that will bring in interested clinicians and an experienced hardware designer. It’s unlikely that traditional funders would support a platform that could be “used, manufactured, improved or adapted anywhere, and help make MR imaging a worldwide, rather than an exclusively first-world, health technology,” they say.

Diagnose then treat

By bringing a HHMRS design to the clinic, physicians could detect, diagnose and assess fractures, nerve entrapments, musculoskeletal tumors, ligament tears, skin moles and lesions, muscle atrophy or even infant brain abnormalities such as encephalitis infections, according to White and Adalsteinsson.

The open-source design might also prompt novel adaptations for human animal imaging or non-destructive produce inspection.

The overall goal would be to bring MR-based diagnostic and assessment capabilities to a broader group of individuals, especially primary care physicians who would otherwise have to refer their patients to imaging specialists before treatment can begin.