MRI scanners are expensive — and impractical in many countries. Here’s how to make them smaller and less costly
MRI scanners are expensive — it costs several million US dollars to purchase, install, maintain and operate one machine. They require a superconducting magnet a couple of metres long, which weighs 5–10 tonnes, cooled by liquid helium and housed in a shielded room to reduce electromagnetic interference. The scanners need a powerful energy source and chilled water to cool other components. Highly trained technicians are essential.
Here we outline progress and highlight five key challenges on which researchers should concentrate. We focus on Africa, the region with which we have most experience, but similar situations exist in South America and South Asia.Nature, a chemist from the United States who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield, a British physicist, for this work. Conventional MRI machines use powerful superconducting magnets to polarize hydrogen nuclei in tissue.
To start, the superconducting magnet can be replaced with a small permanent magnet, which is typically made of neodymium boron iron or samarium cobalt alloys. Such magnets produce a much weaker field than conventional machines , and hundreds to thousands of times less signal.
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