Mini MRI Scanner for spotting Knee Injuries

Researchers from Imperial College London have found a new mini MRI scanner which helps to diagnose knee injuries accurately and quickly. Also this small scale device could help to diagnose conditions such as anterior cruciate ligament injuries which is commonly seen in footballers.

Nowadays knee injuries affect millions of people and MRI scan is essential to diagnose joint injuries. These knee injuries mostly affect either in tendons, meniscus or ligaments. But these structures are not usually visible with normal MRI.

Karyn Chappell said“These structures are normally black on an MRI scan – they simply don’t produce much signal that can be detected by the machine to create the image”. To overcome this problem Chappell introduced the “magic angle” effect in which the brightness of tissues in MRI images strongly depends on the angle between the collagen fibres and the scanner’s magnetic field.

This magic angle can be easily achieved in the mini MRI scanner by changing the orientation of the magnetic field. The working of the magic angle is when a patient sits in a chair, the specially designed magnets rotate around the leg and orientate the magnetic field in multiple directions.

The new device is not possible in current hospital MRI scanners which are much more expensive than the prototype scanner.