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English Portal - A world premiere: the living brain imaged with unrivaled clarity thanks to the world’s most powerful MRI machine

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2024-04-03 00:30:07

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The CEA publishes various scientific and technical periodicals and videos. Through them, you can discover the CEA’s major research topics and the latest technological innovations produced by its laboratories.

The CEA is revealing a series of in vivo human brain images acquired with the Iseult MRI machine and its unmatched 11.7 teslas magnetic field strength. This success is the fruit of more than 20 years of R&D as part of the Iseult project, with one pillar goal being to design and build the world’s most powerful MRI machine. Its ambition is to study healthy and diseased human brains with an unprecedented resolution, allowing us to discover new details relating to the brain’s anatomy, connections, and activity.

Just about four minutes. That’s all it took to acquire some of the most remarkable anatomical images of the brain from participants in the first study involving the Iseult MRI machine. The scanner, which uses magnetic resonance imaging technology, has a magnetic field intensity of 11.7 teslas, making it the most powerful in the world. The images have an impressive resolution for such a short acquisition time – 0.2 mm in-plane resolution and 1 mm slice thickness, which represents a volume equivalent to a few thousand neurons. For comparison, the same image quality would require hours with MRI scanners currently available in hospitals (1.5 or 3 teslas). This is not realistic in practice as patients would not be comfortable and any movement would “blur” the image.