Paschalidis awarded Kilachand Funding for Interdisciplinary Life Science Research

Developing Metamaterials for Low-Cost, Portable MRI

Yannis Paschalidis, BU CISE Director and Professor (ECE, SE, BME, CDS)

Yannis Paschalidis, BU CISE Director and Professor  (ECE, SE, BME, CDS), is among a team of researchers who received a new Kilachand fund award after winning a University-wide funding competition judged by an advisory committee. 

Paschalidis is part of an interdisciplinary team that includes Xin Zhang, BU College of Engineering Professor (ME, ECE, BME, MSE)  and Stephan Anderson, BU School of Medicine Professor of radiology, who will develop an ultra-low field (ULF) MRI system with much smaller magnets, developing a metamaterial-enhanced hardware to physically boost the signal received by the imaging system.

Chuck Leddy writes for BU Brink that the research team will develop ULF-MRI technology with the potential to disrupt existing limitations in MRI and lead to low-cost technology that is readily portable and mobile, and could mitigate financial constraints that prevent MRI from being used prevalently throughout the world.

Leddy writes, “Their metamaterials—materials engineered to have properties that don’t occur naturally—will be optimized by using a specifically developed computational material designer. In addition, an artificially intelligent image reconstruction algorithm will be developed to achieve optimal image quality for clinical diagnosis.”

Read more about this project as well as the four other projects awarded Kilachand funding here.