World Premiere: The Brain Revealed as Never Before Thanks to the World's Most Powerful MRI

SACLAY - It's a world first, and it took place in France: the world's most powerful MRI scanner has delivered its first images of human brains. These are the most precise images ever produced, unveiled this Tuesday.

These images were captured by Iseult. That's the name of this MRI installed on the Saclay plateau, near Paris, in the laboratories of the CEA. This extraordinary magnet reached a magnetic field of 11.7 teslas. It's a world record. This allows for images ten times more precise than those provided by MRIs found in hospitals, which do not exceed three teslas.

Initially, researchers tested Iseult by placing pumpkins inside. They only moved to human brains in recent months thanks to around twenty volunteers who entered the machine. A cylinder five meters long and weighing 132 tonnes. It took only 4 minutes to obtain these images. "It would theoretically take several hours on an MRI implanted in a hospital [1.5 or 3 teslas] for a similar result," explains the CEA.

According to the CEA, this is a major advance for "understanding how our brain encodes our mental representations, our learning, or even [for] discovering what the neuronal signatures of consciousness are."

The details obtained with the Iseult MRI will have applications in medical research. On the one hand, the ultra-fine anatomical information will contribute to establishing a better diagnosis and management of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. On the other hand, the Iseult MRI will facilitate the detection of weak signals, underexploited at low field such as that of lithium, a drug used to treat bipolar disorders; it will thus be possible to precisely evaluate its distribution in the brain and better understand its effectiveness; or those of small molecules actively involved in cerebral metabolism, such as glucose and glutamate; this type of information will directly contribute to the characterization of many brain pathologies (glioma, neurodegeneration...)

The project brought together nearly 200 people, from the CEA but also from industrial and academic partners: Alstom, now GE, for the manufacturing of the magnet; Siemens Healthcare for the installation of complementary components of the magnetic resonance imaging system; Guerbet, a contrast agent manufacturer, which used the CEA's very high-field MRI platform to evaluate and select molecules with high potential for application in humans; The University of Freiburg in Germany for the development of new technologies and methods for ultra-high-field MRI."