EAN 2026 | A portable MRI device: improving access to care with applications in MS and stroke
Anthony Traboulsee, MD, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, comments on the potential of a portable MRI device to revolutionize care in areas with limited access to traditional MRI machines. Prof. Traboulsee highlights that this low-field MRI technology can produce good-quality images of the brain, including small strokes and multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions. This interview took place at the 12th Congress of the European Academy of Neurology (EAN) in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Transcript
We’ve been working with a portable MRI device which was really fantastic in terms of the quality of imaging it can do. This is relatively new technology that is at low field 0.064 tesla. A regular MRI machine is 1.5 tesla or 3 tesla. So this very low field MRI can be plugged into a regular wall. You don’t need any special shielding or protection and it can actually take good quality images of the brain and with improvements of the technology over time the image quality has gotten much better and we can see small strokes as small as three millimeters and multiple sclerosis lesions and we’ve shown some examples of that at our presentation today...
We’ve been working with a portable MRI device which was really fantastic in terms of the quality of imaging it can do. This is relatively new technology that is at low field 0.064 tesla. A regular MRI machine is 1.5 tesla or 3 tesla. So this very low field MRI can be plugged into a regular wall. You don’t need any special shielding or protection and it can actually take good quality images of the brain and with improvements of the technology over time the image quality has gotten much better and we can see small strokes as small as three millimeters and multiple sclerosis lesions and we’ve shown some examples of that at our presentation today. So I’m really excited about the future of low-field MRI. It could revolutionize care in countries that don’t have access to MRI, such as places in Africa and India, but also in remote regions within Canada, North America, Europe, and even emergency departments and ICUs where it’s difficult to move a patient to a regular MRI machine.
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