Strongest MRI in the world to be built in Netherlands

The Netherlands will soon house the strongest MRI scanner in the world with a magnetic field strength of 14 Tesla. A consortium of seven partners, led by Radboud University’s Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, will build the MRI scanner in Nijmegen with a 19 million euros Roadmap grant received from NWO.

“The scanner’s high sensitivity will allow scientists to image the brain in more detail and thereby better understand brain function,” Radboudumc said. “It will also enable them to gain new insights into mechanisms of diseases and their treatment throughout the body.”

The MRI scanner will be placed on the Radboud university medical center campus. But it will be a “tremendous resource for the whole Dutch scientific community” and international partners, project leader David Noris of the Donders Institute said. “With this new sensitive scanner, we intend to open new areas of research for the entire scientific community.”

According to Anja van der Kolk, a neuroradiologist and clinician-scientist at Radboudumc, the scanner is of great importance for researching brain disorders. Brain disorders affect more and more people. “For many of these disorders, no effective treatment is currently available because we do not know how they develop. With the 14T MRI scanner, we will be able to see in great detail, without needing surgery, what happens to the brain when it becomes ill, even at a very early stage. With this information, we hope to find new options for treatment, or even prevention, of these disorders.”

Elia Formisano, professor for Neural Signal Analysis at Maastricht University, expects the 14 Tesla MRI scanner to “revolutionize non-invasive neuroscience by enabling the mapping of neural circuits in humans at an unprecedented level of spatial resolution.”

It can also help in the field of medicine by providing a non-invasive window inside the human body to see how medicine influences diseases, said Dennis Klomp, a professor of high-precision structural and metabolic imaging at UMC Utrecht.

The consortium hopes to have the MRI scanner up and running within three years. In addition to Radboud University, the consortium includes Amsterdam Medical Center, Leiden University Medical Center, Maastricht University, Radboud University Medical Center, Spinoza Center for Neuroimaging, KNAW, and University Medical Center Utrecht.