SBIR Phase II: A suite of flexible printed MRI coils for newborn to adult patients

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to develop a suite of screen-printed receive coils for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), that are flexible, lightweight, low-cost and adapted to the entire population from infants to adults. MRI is widely used to establish a broad variety of clinical diagnosis, but suffers from long examination times and a high rate of failure, resulting in a yearly loss of more than $4 billion in the United States alone. Printed receive coils are extremely flexible, lightweight, and conform well to the human body. With this technology, coils can be designed and manufactured inexpensively to fit all patient sizes, thus improving image quality and enabling robust acceleration of the method. These benefits can contribute to increase the success rate of MRI exams, speed up procedure time, enhance the clinical workflow, and reduce equipment costs. Printed coils will improve the quality of care offered by MRI suites and increase the availability and use of MRI to a wider patient population. Overall, this project will develop a clinical-ready system capable of delivering the full economic and clinical benefits of printed coils, which will contribute to a reduction of the healthcare costs associated with MRI. This project aims to fully realize a clinical-ready system consisting of a collection of printed, flexible lightweight MRI coil arrays, and connecting to a single universal cable to interface with the MRI scanner. A first part of the project will focus on the design of the cable and the associated connection scheme allowing interchange of multiple printed coil arrays of different sizes. Different strategies will be examined with the intent of maintaining high performance and safety while maximizing the advantages brought by printing. A second project goal will focus on the development of a collection of printed coil arrays for patient sizes ranging from newborn to adult, that are compatible with the universal cable and for both 3T and 1.5T scanners. The arrays will be designed for body imaging and will consist of 32-channel devices divided into 16-channel posterior and anterior portions. Their performance will be compared to a commercial 32-channel product. The final system will meet all the safety requirements for medical use and will be ready to be manufactured at scale. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.