Bringing MRI Where It's Needed Most

By Algis V. Urbaitis, Engineer If you haven't had an MRI before, chances are you know someone who has. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is widely used to create pictures of soft tissues in the body -- allowing doctors to identify anything from a torn knee ligament to a concussion. MRIs provide critical early diagnosis of potentially life-threatening injuries, yet their size and cost make them difficult to deploy to hard-to-reach places. That's changing. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, we've developed a portable MRI, also called Battlefield MRI (bMRI), that uses ultra-low-field magnetic resonance imaging to create images of the brain that can be used in field hospitals for wounded soldiers or in remote villages in developing countries. Conventional MRI machines use very large magnetic fields that align the protons in water molecules to create magnetic resonance signals, which are detected by the machine and turned into images. The large magnetic fields create exceptionally detailed images, but they are difficult and expensive to make. Our team 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, we use exquisitely sensitive detectors called Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices, or SQUIDs. Want to learn more about portable MRI? Watch this video. This approach has several advantages: It does not require a huge, powerful, potentially da...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news