Portable MRI Could Aid Wounded Soldiers and Children in the Third World
Hospital-based MRI devices are large and expensive, require considerable infrastructure, and they typically use a large amount of energy. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory wanted to see if images of sufficient quality could be made with ultra-low-magnetic fields, similar in strength to the Earth's magnetic field. To achieve images at such low fields they use extremely sensitive detectors called Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices, or SQUIDs. The team is developing an ultra-low-field MRI system that could be low-power and lightweight enough for deployment on the battlefield and to field hospitals in the world's poorest regions.
Transcript
00:00:05 Michelle Espy: Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a pretty common method of medical imaging for looking at soft tissue anatomy. If you get an MRI in a conventional system in a hospital They're going to use a very large magnetic field, and this large magnetic field produces a high-quality image, but if you've ever experienced an MRI in a hospital you know that that high magnetic field comes with a lot of infrastructure requirements, it's difficult to produce that big magnetic field. So, even though MRI is a fantastic diagnostic technique, there's a lot of places it can't go. Most Third World countries have very restricted access to MRI and our combat support hospitals for our troops typically don't have access to MRI. What my team is trying to do is work kind of at the other end of the spectrum with regard to the magnetic field, and that is to drop it to a very, very weak magnetic field. We have
00:00:59 two systems that we're designing, one system is kind of an R&D system - that's been able to take beautiful images of the brain, even at these very weak magnetic fields. But the goal and objective is to make the system not an R&D system, but a real prototype that can show that these low-field systems can go anywhere, and so the system you see behind me is a second generation system which operates completely unshielded. I think the next step is really to work with an application end in mind, I think there's one direction where we really try and make an MRI system that can serve the military, for example. We've also been talking with pediatric neurosurgeons about a more humanitarian direction to take the system in, for Third World countries, there are a lot of childhood illnesses that would benefit from MRI but the countries don't have the infrastructure to support that kind of
00:02:02 system. I think there's no feeling in the world like when you have an idea, and then it turns into something. You know I will always remember, we spent all this time setting up, then you run the experiment and it isn't until after the last bit of data is taken that you get to see the image. So, you run the experiment, then you push the button and a few minutes later the picture pops up on the screen and it looks like a brain, and that was - wow! We've been very happy that we've been able to take some preliminary images that really show how light, how small, how portable these things can get.