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First Image Taken With an Ultra Low Field MRI
KentuckyFC writes "MRI machines are about to get smaller, much smaller. Most of their bulk is taken up by the huge superconducting magnets required to generate fields of a few Teslas. Now a team at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico has built a machine that can produce images using a field of only a few microTesla (PDF, abstract here). So giant superconducting magnets aren't necessary, a development that has the potential to make MRI machines much smaller, perhaps even suitcase-sized. The one-page paper shows sections of the first 3D brain image taken with the device."
Hmm, they use a prepolarization field of 30 mT for 1 second before using the weaker measurement field of 46 uT. So I'm wondering why they don't just use the 30 mT field and be done with it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Hopefully this will also put an end to those pesky MRI accidents. Not that they're common, but still, those things aren't toys.
Plusses: less (very expensive) liquid helium or (less expensive but still $$) liquid nitrogen. Less of a magnetic field means much higher MRI safety; everything from oxygen cylinders to chairs to guns have been drawn into/against MRIs (the gun was a prison guard who got pushy and DEMANDED to be in the same room as a prisoner. Yeah, the gun went off. No, nobody was hurt.)
Negatives: since the MRI isn't as strong, it might be more affected by local magnetic fields from wiring, ferrous objects, etc. Dunno. Right now, MRIs are installed into big rooms that have as little ferrous material as possible, and then very carefully "shimmed" to adjust for the building and local magnetic fields by a technician. Even if an MRI gets down to "suitcase" size, the necessity of a "clean" environment and calibration for each location might make moving them around very tough.
As a side note, there are already shielded MRI machines which work in a trailer and require little setup time, but being outdoors makes things easier- no building infrastructure to mess with the magnetic fields.
Please help metamoderate.
I had to have several MRI & CT scans and that friggin tunnel is more than I can handle.
They tried to put me in one with the normal little tunnel (about as big around as a five gallon bucket) and I freaked out before I got 2' into it and made them back me out. Then they put me in an "open" MRI machine but it was like being crushed under a car. No way Jose. Abort #2.
So I went to another city where they had a different kind that was a little more "open" than #2.
This one then pumped me full of Xanax and I survived it.
The CT scan was not quite as bad because it was like a large doughnut and there was only about 1' of my body inside it but it still freaked me out.
Xanax on that one too.
I swore I'll die before I ever go in one of those damn things ever again.
They need to come up with a better way. Some people can't handle that crap.
I hope these new ones are a break away from the "trapped in a pipe" or "crushed under a car" machines.
I wonder if this could finally lead to an "in home" MRI scanner? If it costs under a thousand bucks and a person has a family history of cancer, why not invest in one?
Basically the device would be conveniently rolled over the bed once a month or so and scan. It will utilize advanced 3D image analysis to compare with last couple month's scan and see if you have any growing tumors. If so then you go get a proper scan done.
This will go well with the "in toilet" piss or shit tester that will tell you if you're going diabetic or may be developing some other medical conditions for example like kidney disease or cancer, etc..
I work at one of those MRI places and we do research and we are a non-profit. Although we're quite fully booked every day the use of the MRI still cost ~$500/hour. Basically the cost of operation divided by the number of scans done last year makes the price. Or do you think supercooling magnets to ~5K (that's Kelvin, convert to Celsius or Fahrenheit yourself) 24/7, the machine itself (~$3m) and support contract (~$125k) are paid for by the government not talking about the workstations to process the data and of course, my daily food?
About the article: those pictures are pretty unclear but it's promising.
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The whole proclaimed need for communications surveillance and arbitary invasions of ideological nations is because there's not a practical warning and defense system against some jackass carrying a bomb.
Now, there is.
If small, portable MRIs can be mass produced, we could have simple scanners that you step through in key areas, and quickly identify if you have explosives on your person. There's no need for trying to figure out who might try and blow someone or something up. Instead, we'll just be able to catch people with explosives as they walk down the street.
The implications of this sort of capability are far reaching. If the state can effectively monitor explosives themselves, there's no need to even really spend too much effort chasing after people, and as such, doesn't have to take draconian measures to protect itself. Empires have again become possible. If the USA had thousands of these things in Iraq, ringing check points and troop locations, or even, if possible, scanning ahead of convoys, then, the only weapon terrorists have would be effectively eliminated. A guy carries explosives somewhere, and he gets caught. Perhaps a state could even follow people buying chemical precursers. RDX (the stuff used to make C4), for example, has some stuff that's rather unusual in its own right. Perhaps a state could follow people that have explosives, for example, if a weapons maker is actually trying to bring parts to the leader of a cell for distribution, you could let him or her actually transport the explosives, and tail him, and bust the larger cell up.
Checkmate, terrorists across the globe. The Capitalist imperialists are about to take away your only weapon. Of course, the downside is, is that, if the third world suddenly has no weapon against a colonial occupation, then, why, one might ask, would we not occupy the third world? If Iraq was only 20 billion a year, there were few casualties, and pumping loads of oil, how many people would really care.
Within our lifetimes, technology such as this will allow the first world to carve up the third. It is inevitable.
This is my sig.
That's what I thought. People with a pacemaker for instance, can not be imaged with an MRI anymore now. Hopefully that'll change in the near future.
-- Cheers!
So how is it possible, as another poster claims, for a $3000 MRI to cost $50 in India? Do the machines cost only $50,000 there instead of $3M, support contracts $2K instead of $125K, electricity 60 times cheaper, etc.? Something doesn't, as they say, "add up".
IN GENERAL:
Medical research happens when there's money behind the disease. Once the advance is made and commoditized for great loads of money to the first world (and the research is the main thing priced, not the build construction), it can be exported to the developing world and add value slightly to their firstworld sales numbers, for little extra effort.
If the first world didn't exist, then the developing world wouldn't have the luxury of down-marketting - they would have to get by without the tech being developed, or with the tech being a lot more expensive (somewhere between firstworld and developing world price).
There are of course specific contradictions to this, and the US pharma market has (like most aspects of the US economy) decided to spend more on advertising and profitability than original research...
But in a hypothetical company that puts most money towards research - for a $1 pill to exist for the third world, it has to cost $0.75 to build (yay, profit) and it has to sell to Americans for $75. Otherwise, if they couldn't count on the US market, it would be available for $5 or $10 to the whole world. And if they knew that they couldn't sell enough to make the same return on investment... they wouldn't have developed the drug in the first place.
It's a nuanced point, and so it will never be brought up in the public discourse, ever. The debate will be "Socialized medicine?! We have the best healthcare system evar! It's where rich third world dictators bring their kids," versus people who see the rest of the world not being bled dry by their medical establishments.
It's kind of a reverse tragedy of the commons - the AIDs drugs are going to benefit lots of poor Africans if they are developed, because production cost is virtually nil. But they won't be developed unless they can generate a good return on (their large research) investment by charging the richest nations through the nose.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation