©DentMRI

What has the ATTRACT seed funding enabled you to do so far?

ATTRACT has enabled us to construct and successfully operate “DentMRI – Gen I”. This is a prototype Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner with which we have obtained the world’s first medical images featuring both hard and soft biological tissues at low magnetic fields.

What challenges have you faced so far?

The main difficulty attached to this project is the weak, short-lived signal emitted by hard, solid tissues. To overcome this, we have devised a new dedicated scanner (“DentMRI – Gen I”), as well as novel pulse sequences that efficiently extract information from the sample.”

Where does your ATTRACT journey go from here?

After having demonstrated the first images combining hard and soft tissues, we will build a second generation scanner (“DentMRI – Gen II”) compatible with medical use in dental clinics. To that end, we will further reduce the size and price with respect to conventional MRI systems, and we will shorten scan times down to a few minutes.

Sum up in two sentences the advantages of the ATTRACT Programme over other research funding schemes.

The ATTRACT programme is beautifully designed for supporting research and technology transfer activities such as ours: it is flexible in resource allocation, and does not burden with unnecessary administration.

For more information

Visit the DentMRI project site.