French Researchers Building Massive New Scanner to Tackle Brain Disease

 By Reuters Staff    September 24, 2019

A giant magnet with a magnetic field of 11.7 T. is seen at the Neurospin facility of the CEA Saclay Nuclear Research Center, near Paris, France, Sept. 7, 2019.

PARIS (Reuters) - French researchers are developing what they say will be the most powerful magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner in the world, which will use a supermagnet the weight of a blue whale and should allow earlier diagnosis of diseases such as Parkinson's.

"We can potentially detect the disease in its earlier stages and, consequently, monitor it more precisely," Nicolas Boulant, the project's scientific director, told Reuters.

The scanner, part of what is called Project Iseult, is being developed by the French researchers at the NeuroSpin research facility at the CEA's Paris-Saclay Center (Essonne). The scanner involves a new supermagnet in a cylinder shape which is much heavier than those in use already.

The supermagnet measures 5 meters (16 feet) in length and 5 meters in diameter and weighs 130 metric tons. It will generate a magnetic field of 11.7 tesla. (Current imaging machines, used in hospitals, produce a magnetic field of 1.5 T or 3 T.)

It will obtain brain images a hundred times more detailed than current imaging machines, the researchers say. It is still in development and is expected to produce its first image by the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021.

Project Iseult will allow scientists "to better understand our brain and how it works, and to study characteristics of what is special to the human species, things like music, mathematics and language," added Boulant.

More information (in English) about the magnet is available on the project's website, in a 2017 article describing the transport of the magnet from the assembly plant to the research facility (http://bit.ly/2l93Jji).

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/918876?src=rss