Ultra-high field scanners slowly grew from research into clinical use ever since Siemens obtained approvals to use its 7T MRI scanner for head and knee imaging in late 2017. Europe has also staked on their potential, indicated via the new installations of 7T scanners in several hospitals in 2019 such as Erlangen University Clinic (Germany), Poitiers University Hospital (France), and University College Hospital (United Kingdom) among others. Ultra-high field scanners have delivered on their promise – with remarkable improvement in brain images of unprecedented contrast to noise ratio and spatial and/or temporal resolutions. This is a breakthrough for clinical and neuroscientific research; at the same time, however, several limitations have been reported, hindering both the clinical application and market penetration of ultra-high field MRI. At such ultra-high field strengths, the main issue is the inhomogeneities in the transmission phase of the MRI causing heterogeneous excitation of the nuclear spins. This induces shadows or contrast losses in MR images of the human brain, making the impacted regions diagnostically deficient. To tackle these inhomogeneities in ultra-high field MRI, several solutions are under development but due to their complexity, they will need several years to integrate clinical routines. Therefore, the growing market of 7T scanners in Europe is in urgent need of a simple and effective solution to solve this issue. The main objective of this project is to bring to market an efficient, low-cost, safe and durable solution developed during the M-Cube FET-Open project. This project fits in the scope of Europe’s race for its highly competitive position at global level in MRI. By achieving translation from research into clinical application, it will bring on the newly 7T scanners market an effective solution that is not hindered by the drawbacks of the current best solution in the literature (independents RF coils used to modulate the RF signals): manufacturing of complex electronics, adapting imaging sequences, monitoring SAR levels, costs, scanning duration. Therefore, the overall objective of the project is to capitalize on the M-cube project momentum to turn a result obtained into a marketable innovation. To that end, the proof-of-concept prototype developed in the laboratory will be transferred into an industrial level medical device in terms of conception and method of elaboration. Once the industrial process is validated, device safety and usability proofs are produced for its CE marking process. Finally, the device is presented to hospitals and laboratories in order to sell at least 50 units by the end of the project.
