| Boston University researchers have developed a new, “intelligent” metamaterial – which costs less than ten dollars to build – that could revolutionize magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), making the entire MRI process faster, safer, and more accessible to patients around the world. | |
| The technology, which builds on previous metamaterial work by the team, was described in a new paper in Advanced Materials (“Intelligent Metamaterials Based on Nonlinearity for Magnetic Resonance Imaging”). |
| MRI is used by clinicians to diagnose medical problems by spotting abnormalities that could indicate anything from a torn meniscus to muscular dystrophy. But MRIs are expensive, expose patients to radiation, and they take a long time–often the greater part of an hour for a single scan. Finding enough MRI time for waiting patients can be a problem, even in US hospitals, but in hospitals in countries like India, waiting periods of a year or more can put patients’ lives at risk. | |
| So how do we speed up the MRI process without jeopardizing the quality of imaging? Xin Zhang, a BU College of Engineering professor of mechanical engineering and a Photonics Center professor, and a team of researchers that includes Stephan Anderson, a Boston Medical Center radiologist and BU School of Medicine professor of radiology, and Xiaoguang Zhao, a MED assistant research professor of radiology, are getting creative with metamaterials to solve the problem. | |
| MRI works by generating a powerful magnetic field and sending radio waves into a patient’s body. “An MRI’s magnetic field is many thousands of times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field,” says Zhao. “A precisely orchestrated series of higher-energy radio waves are sent into the human body, and the tissues emit lower-energy radio waves that are received by the MRI to produce an image.” |
Image Credit: Zhang et al.
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