64 million times better sharpness

Fifty years after the first image taken with MRI technology, researchers from Duke University, in cooperation with scientists from several universities, succeeded in creating an MRI image that is 64 million times clearer than the usual technology.

The new technology captures data in three dimensions and creates so-called “voxels”, that is, pixels in three dimensions, where the size of each building block of the image is only 5 microns. Among other things, this can help us understand what happens in the brain affected by Alzheimer's disease.

With the help of a 9.4 Tesla magnet, up to three to four times stronger than today's magnets, and the computing power of a smaller supercomputer, the researchers were able to capture an image sequence of an entire mouse brain – of which we see a section here.