Reinventing magnetic resonance imaging for accessible healthcare: Whole‐body imaging at 0.05 Tesla

Abstract

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology has revolutionized the field of medical imaging by providing a non-invasive, non-ionizing and quantitative approach to visualizing different tissue types and assessing their structural and physiological integrity. Despite its importance and five decades of engineering development, the accessibility of MRI is low and extremely inhomogeneous around the world. This is due to the high cost and complex infrastructure requirements of existing high-field superconducting MRI scanners, which limit their availability in low and middle-income countries, and exclude their easy access in many healthcare facilities such as neurology clinics, trauma centres, surgical suites, neonatal/pediatric centres and community clinics. We and others have made intensive efforts in recent years to engineer lowcost and shielding-free MRI scanners for brain imaging at ultra-low-field (ULF) strengths (<0.1 T). [1][2][3][4][5] However, these developments are limited to brain and extremity imaging and their image quality is generally poor.Recently we have developed a compact, low-power and highly simplified ULF MRI scanner that enables wholebody imaging with high image quality via computing. 6 In this work, we designed and prototyped a cost-effective whole-body 0.05 T MRI scanner that operates on a standard AC wall power outlet without any radiofrequencyThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.