The majority of our global population today
don't have access to MRI.
We wanted to make MR accessible to people who did not have
access to that kind of diagnostic tool.
So there are many barriers that are limiting the access to MRI today.
Either because of geographic location,
financial reasons,
and also maybe because they are claustrophobic,
and they're not able to get themselves in the bore
or they have implants.
MR today is known as a machine which is big, heavy,
difficult to use, and requires complex infrastructure.
We found that these are the fundamental barriers
which we have to break if we want to bring MR to where it's not been before.
We had a vision of producing an MRI magnet similar to the mass of a refrigerator just
provide power. A simple plug-and-play MRI magnet with all operational infrastructure integrated.
We realized a magnet cooled by a sealed helium system
containing just 0.7 liters of liquid helium. A key focus of a magnet design was to minimise weight.
This ensured the magnet can be cooled down quickly just using its own refrigerator.
Since the beginning of clinical MRI there has been basically one direction and that was more, more, more.
Higher field strength, higher gradients, more channels, and so on.
And there were good reasons for this. In this project we have a completely different focus.
We want to bring MRI where it's not used today. This is a big change in perspective.
Think about it this way: does it really matter if you go to work by a sports car or with a compact car? In the
end you will be there at the same time. This we are now trying to translate into the world of MRI.
We are not building a system for the high-end research but for clinical routine applications.
The effort to install a magnet in a common building can get very very complicated. You
have to do a lot of planning and preparation before you can really enter with the magnet and
the system into the building. With our new product this is getting much much easier because you don't
have to consider a quench pipe connection, you don't have to consider helium filling, you don't
have to consider the magnet power supply, and a couple of other things which are really gone.
The project vision of bringing an MR where it's never been before means at the same time meeting
also new user groups on site and we needed to enable them to operate MRs. And for those
new users we decided to start completely from scratch redesigning rethinking the whole workflow.
We set up process and method to define reliabilities. We developed reliability
stress tests to check performance and see if the components hit the targets.
It's one of the most challenging projects for MR
to achieve so high reliable product with so many newly developed components.
Hard work, hard work and a passion throughout the entire team to actually
do something that's very hard to challenge the kind of market expectations and the norm
which we ourselves as a business have actually set previously. And to do things differently.
It didn't feel like a holiday trip every time but today when I'm looking at the scanner
I really feel proud about what we have achieved as a global team together.
We're taking 35 years of experience and learning from clinical MRI
and condense it into a new system. It was a true journey to new fields and it was a great highly
agile and cross-functional team experience.
I think it's four words: less is sometimes more.