Helium-Free, Bench-Top MRI Scanner Draws Interest at Meetings

Ultra-compact, helium-free, preclinical, bench-top magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners have been designed for preclinical imaging of lab animals.

The MR Solutions presented the new scanner at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting in Washington DC (USA), on April 6-10, 2013, and the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) annual meeting in Salt Lake City (UT, USA), on April 20-26, 2013. The new technology spurred a lot of interest for the participants.

Dr. David Taylor, CEO of MR Solutions (Guildford, UK), said, “We were overwhelmed by the interest in this new scanner one of a range to follow soon. We were repeatedly told it was a game changer; producing high quality images without compromise and able to fit within an existing laboratory at a price which is more than competitive.”

MR Solutions, developed the world’s first commercial 3T scanner late in 2012, and in January 2013, introduced two larger bore machines to complete the range. The smaller two of the new scanners, the 16-cm bore, is available now (3T) while the other two machines—31-cm 3T and 72-cm 1.5T—will be available by the end of 2013; orders for these units are already in the works. The new range of three scanners will be able to scan from small to medium-sized animals.

The advantages of these technologic advances are: (1) the scanners provide excellent soft tissue contrast and molecular imaging capabilities. (2) They are very cost-effective as there is no need for all the cryogen cooling equipment. (3) Because they have a very small stray magnetic field, the scanners can be positioned close to other imaging equipment to enable multimodality imaging on the same subject. (4) Lastly, because of the lack of liquid helium cooling and required safety equipment, the scanners are easy to install and need no expensive building alterations.

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