Dielectric pads for high field MRI

From research centers like CEA-Neurospin in France who recently acquired a 11.7T scanner to hospitals such as Saint Thomas in UK who acquired the latest commercial 7T scanner from Siemens, healthcare has taken a tremendous leap forward those last years. Indeed, ultra-high field scanners provide images with better spatial and/or temporal resolutions that are used for early diagnosis of disease and therefore enhance their treatments. However, several limitations have been reported, hindering clinical application of these devices. At such field strengths, one of the main issues is the heterogeneous excitation of the nuclear spins. Typically, it leads to shadows or contrast losses across the human brain images at 7T but also abdomen images at 3T. Those scanners still account for around 30% of the market in 2013. To tackle this issue, several solutions are under development but due to their complexity, it will require several years before their integration into clinical routines. This is even more so given the fact that most of those solutions are active: a careful monitoring of the energy absorbed by the human body which increases exponentially with the initial field is required so it remains below safety limitations. Therefore, there is right now an unfulfilled need of a simple and effective solution for all the 3T active scanners and also for the growing market of 7T scanners. It will greatly benefit clinical imaging applications but first need to be labelled as a CE medical device (MD). The current project objective is to bring to the market a side solution developed during the FET-OPEN project Mcube. First, an industrial process for the elaboration is studied and validated. Then, elaborated prototypes safety tests such as temperature monitoring, specific absorption rate or leaking tests are carried out to prove they are safe for clinical use. Finally, their performance are evaluated on phantoms as well as on volunteers.