The most powerful MRI scanner in the world delivers its first images!

The most powerful MRI scanner in the world delivers its first images!

October 7, 2021

The 11.7 Tesla MRI of the Iseult project, the most powerful in the world for human imaging, has just unveiled its first images. They validate the entire process that has enabled, thanks to multiple technological breakthroughs, the transformation of an «outstanding» magnet, delivered in 2017 to the CEA-Paris-Saclay site, into an «imager». This MRI, designed by CEA engineers and researchers together with Siemens Healthineers, will enable major advances in fundamental research, cognitive sciences and in understanding brain pathologies.

These images are the culmination of 20 years of research that have enabled us to apply innovative technological developments made for CERN to medical research. This achievement is also the fruit of a Franco-German cooperation initiated in 2006, which involved academic partners, the University of Freiburg, and industrial partners, Bruker Biospin, Alstom, now part of General Electric, Guerbet and Siemens Healthineers. Siemens Healthineers has installed the MAGNETOM 11.7 T imaging equipment that has enabled the acquisition of these first images.

An extraordinary magnet at the heart of the MRI from the Iseult project

132 tons, 5 m in length, 5 m in external diameter and 90 cm in internal diameter (to allow the passage of a whole human body): these are the extraordinary dimensions of the magnet of the Iseult project, which reaches a nominal magnetic field of 11.7 Teslas, much more powerful than that of standard hospital MRIs (typically 1.5 or 3 T). To achieve this field, the magnet is powered by a current of 1,500 amps. The magnetic field of 11.7 T is a world record in the field of MRI for such a volume, and an absolute record with this type of superconductor material. For Stanislas Dehaene, director of NeuroSpin, the neuroimaging platform at CEA-Paris-Saclay, «Thanks to this extraordinary MRI, our researchers are looking forward to studying the anatomical and structural organization of the brain in greater detail. This work will undoubtedly lead to major clinical applications.