Ya’ll know that MRI machines are great hulking lumps o’ metal filled with pulsing tubes of liquid helium and evil superconducting magnets that’ll rip yer fillings out if ya as much as smile at ‘em.
All that bulk is necessary to create the fantastic magnetic fields of several Tesla needed make the protons in yer body to line up in a way that makes it possible to image them.
Now all that is set to change thanks to Vadim “Eye teeth” Zotef and buddies at the Los Alamos National Labroatory in New Mexico. They gone and built themselves a machine that can image the brain using fields of only a few microTesla. Yep, thats microTesla. That has the potential to make MRI machines much smaller, perhaps even suitcase size
The trick is to use ultrasensitive devices known as SQUIDs (superconducing quntum interference devices) to do the imaging at much lower magfnetic field strengths. SQUIDs are so sensitive that they can pick up the magnetic fields generated by yer brain even as ya are a-thinkin and a-dreamin.
So Eye Teeth Zotef has combined the two things into one new toy: an ultra low field MRI machine plus a magnetoencephalograph.
This picture shows several layers from the first 3D image of a human skull and brain made in this way.
Champagne all round. (Or is it MGD they drink over at Los Alamos? Ah forget.)
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0711.0222: Microtesla MRI of the Human Brain with Simultaneous MEG