MRI at Bedside Fundamental research by Matthew Rosen, director of the Low-Field Imaging Laboratory in the Martinos Center, contributed to the early development of a new portable MRI scanner by Hyperfine Research Inc. The potentially game-changing technology was introduced in October 2019 at the American College of Emergency Physicians meeting in Denver. Over the past several decades, MRI has emerged as a gold standard in biomedical imaging, allowing imaging of structures and even processes in the human body that would have been unimaginable 30 years ago, when the first generation of commercial MRI scanners was introduced. But for all the advances in the years since, the underlying technology— and its inherent limitations—have remained largely the same. MRI scanners today still depend on hulking superconducting magnets to produce the high magnetic fields needed for imaging. As a result, the scanners are confined to highly specialized MRI suites in hospitals or to large, tractor trailer-based units parked on hospitals’ lawns. Rosen started thinking about ways to overcome these limitations in the early 2000s, while a postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He dove
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headlong into the work when he moved the Martinos Center in 2009. Initially, his efforts in this area were aimed at supporting the Department of Defense and combat casualty care to “break the MRI scanner out of its controlled access environment in the radiology suite and reinvent it in a way that could operate in field-forward environments,” he says. This early work inspired efforts in his group to innovate in the area of ultralow-field MRI, where the magnetic field is essentially “turned down” so the scanner is compatible with both mobile operation and undisclosed shrapnel but still could be sensitive enough to make clinically actionable MRI images in short scan times.
Above: Mass General is now using the portable MRI scanner in the clinic. Shown here with the system are the Center’s Matt Rosen and Mass General neurologist Taylor Kimberly. Photo courtesy of Matt Rosen.
