So 7-Tesla MRI or ultra-high field MRI started about in Canada in the late 90s and it was a major leap in taking human MRI from the typical imaging field strength that’s 1.5-Tesla and 3-Tesla to what we call the ultra-high field imaging world. And the leap happened in the late 90s. There was an 8-Tesla followed by a few 7-Teslas and now I’d say there’s maybe 100 to 125 MRI systems that are at 7-Tesla or higher around the world for human imaging...
So 7-Tesla MRI or ultra-high field MRI started about in Canada in the late 90s and it was a major leap in taking human MRI from the typical imaging field strength that’s 1.5-Tesla and 3-Tesla to what we call the ultra-high field imaging world. And the leap happened in the late 90s. There was an 8-Tesla followed by a few 7-Teslas and now I’d say there’s maybe 100 to 125 MRI systems that are at 7-Tesla or higher around the world for human imaging. 7-Tesla offers incredible advantages over what you typically get at lower field strength. It’s the ability to enhance the contrast of the images, in addition to the ability of increasing the resolution of the images as well as reducing the scan time if applicable. So it’s pretty much similar to going from a lower resolution camera to more of an ultra-high resolution camera and then added on top of that is the enhanced contrast and the ability to get images at lower scan time compared to before.
7-Tesla is kind of riddled with technical hurdles related to the physics of the imaging, related to the devices that are used on the imaging, related to the safety of the imaging itself and the safety of the participants in the scanner. This is what our program and our lab has been focused on over the last 15 years or so. Our lab is called the 7-Tesla Bioengineering Research Program (the 7TBRP) in Pittsburgh and we’ve been building what we call RF coil systems over the last, I’d say, 10 to 15 years that aim at overcoming these challenges and these technical hurdles that I mentioned and we made a great leap in 2015 by building what we call the first generation Tic Tac Toe RF coil system and this first generation coil we used on many NIH studies. It had a lot of improvement compared to existing solutions, but it still was more of an engineering tool, not really ready for prime time and patients and imaging and, you know, high throughput imaging. So over the last 7 or 8 years or so, we’ve been working on the second generation RF coil system, and we just developed it and we finished it in June 2022 and we have rolled it out to our users.It’s a pretty unique design.
It has 60 transmit channels, which is first of a kind and 32 receive channels. The coil is also open from the front, so it’s an anti-claustrophobic solution for imaging. This is, you know, a major issue for especially older adults as they go into the magnet and feel things to be a little bit claustrophobic and since we rolled it out to our users, it’s really achieved remarkable success. It’s currently used in 36 NIH funded studies from the United States. We have done already more than 1000 in-vivo scans on it in a span of one year. It’s supporting funding that comes from the US government through NIH that’s exceed $155 million and it’s been growing and used and mostly used in studies related to dementia, aging, and late-life depression. So things that are related kind of to the latter stages of aging for people. What it has done so far based on this new resolution and the new contrast that we’re getting, which really far exceeds what you typically get at 3-Tesla, is that it makes, for example, the volumetric measures of the brain much more accurate compared to what you get at 3-Tesla.
It improves the statistics of these measurements and calculations and in addition to that as well, it has the ability to visualize microvessels, arteries at a significantly much better than what you get at 3-Tesla or 1.5-Tesla. And then the other very exciting thing that we’ve been using in relation to that coil and the 7-Tesla is to do flow measurements and real time MRI, which what our lab has been kind of focused on over the last year or two or so, where we trying to look at the CSF flow, we’re trying to perform imaging at very high speeds. So we’re able to acquire images of the whole brain in a span of 150 to 250 milliseconds. So we’re looking at a quarter of a second or even less. And then see how the CSF goes through the ventricles and then go laterally and come back down and do all of that kind of real time and hopefully with studies that we’re currently conducting, such as sleep studies that look at CSF flow, we can make relations to PET imaging and PET positive and PET negative and as well as the brain volumetrics and many other factors related to small vessel disease and kind of bring it all up together to the process of aging, dementia, late life depression, Alzheimer disease, and kind of go from there.
