Zhang team proves that precisely engineered, low-cost structures can be used to boost the power and speed of medical imaging
Photos by Jackie Ricciardi
By allowing clinicians to look noninvasively inside the human body, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a mainstay of injury and disease detection and treatment planning and monitoring. But not everyone has benefited equally: the most powerful modern MRI tech is typically bulky, rigid, and expensive, limiting its use and impact in low-resource and remote areas.
At Boston University, Distinguished Professor of Engineering Xin Zhang (ME, ECE, BME, MSE) is leading a team that’s working to democratize access to MRI, developing innovative devices that can make scans faster, cheaper, and more accurate. To do it, they’ve turned to metamaterials—precisely engineered structures that use surprisingly ordinary building blocks, such as copper, fabric, and plastic, to manipulate electromagnetic waves and radio frequencies.
Their work has led to a string of breakthrough devices that can sharpen and speed up MRI imaging of knees, ankles, spines, and more. Each new metamaterials tool and method—from resonators that manipulate magnetic fields to wearable, jewelry-like bracelets that cut background noise—is capable of dramatically boosting the power of MRI. The researchers have reported their findings in a series of recent journal articles.
“How can we improve MRI technology to enable clear imaging that’s also affordable, accessible, and tolerable for patients?” says Zhang, a BU College of Engineering distinguished professor of engineering. “This is a practical problem I’ve been interested in for a long time.”