Scientists at ‘Bomb Factory’ Develops MRI Magnets to Eliminate India’s dependency on China
| Onkareshwar Pandey - Editor in Chief - CEO, IOP - 23 Aug 2022

Good News for India's Healthcare

The MRI magnet system is at its final stage of assembly at IUAC, New Delhi. The present development would boost up the indigenous manufacturing of MRI magnets in the country to provide wider healthcare access.

This superconducting MRI magnet system is like the Heart of the MRI. If it becomes indigenous, it will not only save billions of Rupees from import bills and put India in the league of select few MRI manufacturer countries but will also be helpful in eliminating our dependency on Countries like China.

The technology of the MRI magnet system is very complex which are owned and protected by a few major manufacturers in the US and Europe. There is no commercial manufacturer of whole-body MRI scanners in India.

Currently, India is the number one and largest importer of MRI Machines from China which accounts for 5,165 shipments as on 6 Oct 2021 according to Volza's India Import data of MRI sourced from 70 countries.

By Onkareshwar Pandey

New Delhi, Aug 23, 2022:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi must be happy to read this news as any other citizen like me. Working on his vision to produce Make in India products, the Scientists of a lesser known Government Institution ‘Inter-University Accelerator Centre’, New Delhi has developed a 1.5T superconducting MRI magnet system for a whole-body clinical scanner.The whole-body superconducting MRI scanner is one of the costliest diagnostic tools thereby its access is mostly in metro cities and big towns.

Popularly known among the locals as ‘Bomb Factory’ due to its earlier name ‘Nuclear Science Centre’ (NSC) and more importantly due to poor science communication in the country, the Inter-University Accelerator Centre (IUAC) is an autonomous Inter-University Centre established in the year 1984 by University Grants Commission (UGC) under the Ministry of Education (formerly MHRD).

This superconducting MRI magnet system is like the Heart of the MRI. If it becomes indigenous, it will not only save billions of Rupees from import bills and put India in the league of select few MRI manufacturer countries but will also be helpful in eliminating our dependency on Countries like China. 

The MRI scanner machine is used to take images of any part of the body (e.g., head, joints, abdomen, legs, etc.), for the detection of various diseases by providing precise contrast resolution in any imaging direction.

The horizontal tube in an MRI Machine, through which the patient enters, known as the bore, contains a strong magnet from front to back. This magnet is the most important component of an MRI system. The entire system proves incredibly strong with the ability to produce a large, stable magnetic field. And to generate such powerful magnetic fields tens of thousands of times greater than the Earth's own magnetic field, MRI scanners use high-strength permanent magnets in which the magnetic field cannot be dissipated.

And this Development of the whole-body Superconducting MRI magnet System (IMRI project) has been done by our Indian scientists (the Beam Transport System (BTS) Group) at IUAC, Inter-University Accelerator Centre, Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi. Since the funding for this project comes from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Govt. of India, that’s why MeitY tried taking credit for this project at its initial stage.

The BTS Group, an Accelerator Support Central Group (AcSCG), which takes care of the BTS instruments of all the accelerators and associated experimental facilities at IUAC is also responsible for the design, manufacture, operation, and maintenance of accelerator magnet power supplies and other BTS-associated instruments.

Working day and night without a break even during the Covid19, the BTS Group of IUAC has successfully completed the development of the Prototype of a whole-body Superconducting MRI magnet System (IMRI project).

The MRI machine with field strengths of 1.5 teslas has electromagnets 1,500 times more powerful than a fridge magnet which is about 0.001 tesla and 30,000X the geomagnetic field (The Earth’s magnetic field), which is 0.00005 tesla.

When a radiofrequency source is switched on and off, repeatedly knocking the protons out of line and back into alignment in a human body, which is mostly water (hydrogen and oxygen), and when in the massive, stable magnetic field of the scanner, the hydrogen protons get aligned in the same direction, the receivers pick up radio signals that the protons send out, and by combining these signals, the machine creates a detailed image of the body’s inside.

Since MRI machines provide better soft tissue contrast that can differentiate between fat, water, muscle, and other soft tissue better than CT, which is usually better at imaging bones, medical practitioners around the world prefer it for imaging non-bony parts and soft tissues within the body. The brain, spinal cord, nerves, muscles, ligaments, and tendons are all seen on MRI scans more clearly than on other scans such as x-rays or CT scans.

The costs of these machines are quite high in the market because the MRI scanners are built around massive superconducting magnets with a nominal cost of $1 M per tesla of the magnetic field.

And that’s why a single unit of 1.5 teslas MRI machines is INR 5-6 Crore to 9- 11 Crore for a single unit of 3 teslas. Refurbished 1.5 T Siemens Magnetom Symphony Closed MRI Scanners are sold at the rate of ₹ 1.75 Crore to 3 Crore in India.

In India, there is 1.5 MRI machine per million of the population whereas in developed countries it is more than 10 MRI per million of the population. Hence, India needs a large number of MRI machines in the next few years which is only possible through indigenous manufacturing, thereby providing easy and cheaper healthcare access to the people. Presently in India, ₹1800 - ₹ 2000 crore worth of MRI scanners is imported in a year. 

In addition, 10% of expenses are incurred as the comprehensive maintenance contract (CMC) for these imported MRI scanners.

The technology of the MRI magnet system is very complex which are owned and protected by a few major manufacturers in the US and Europe. There is no commercial manufacturer of whole-body MRI scanners in India. Currently, India is the number one and largest importer of MRI Machines from China which accounts for 5,165 shipments as on 6 Oct 2021 according to Volza's India Import data of MRI sourced from 70 countries.

The development of this low-cost MRI machine in India will bring down the exorbitant costs to the patients. At present, in India, an MRI machine costs more than Rs 5-6 crore, and therefore the charges are also high per scan for the consumers (Rs 5,000 and above depending on the requirement). Below mentioned is the cost data collected from market research:A study indicates that India currently has approximately 3500 MRI machines which include low field, 1.5T, 3 T, and refurbished machines, and installing 350-400 machines per year. The overall requirement of MRI in India could be approx. 7000-8000 machines to make this basic diagnostic machine available to the Indian masses.

The installation of such a large number of MR systems would require huge capital investments still the cost of the scan remains prohibitively expensive for common people. The highest number (∼50) of available scanners per million inhabitants is found in Japan, which coincidentally has a policy that has facilitated the spread and availability of low‐field scanners, while in India and China the number of available scanners is much lower (∼0.89).

There are two main factors responsible for this:

1) the price of installing the systems and post-installation maintenance, and

2) the complexity of operating an MR system.

The superconducting magnet represents a significant portion of the overall cost, with very high requirements for homogeneity and temporal stability.

The spin-offs of such a development in magnet technology, including field stabilization, shimming, RF-coil design, and field gradient coils, five distinct areas of research and development with the potentials for export can get a boost:

1) Analytical Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), also known as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy—determination of structure and dynamics of small organic molecules and large biological macromolecules using small vertical-bore (2–10 cm),

2) Biomedical and preclinical MRI and MRS—animal research using horizontal medium bore size (10–40 cm),

3) Human head only (60–70 cm bore) and whole-body (80–125 cm bore) MRI and MRS—in clinical diagnostics for possible integration with mobile units and telemedicine to cover large population under health care,

4) Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, particularly deep learning, for image-recognition tasks may lead to cheaper magnet technology with known inhomogeneities,

5) Functional MRI for cognitive sciences and scientific basis of yoga and meditation

6) The growth of the business of AMC in Medicare.

Inter-University Accelerator Centre (IUAC), New Delhi has indigenously designed the first ever whole-body 1.5T MRI magnet in India under the IMRI project. The MRI magnet system is at its final stage of assembly at IUAC, New Delhi. The present development would boost up the indigenous manufacturing of MRI magnets in the country to provide wider healthcare access.

A few Indian industries are willing to build commercial MRI magnets using this indigenous technology of MRI magnets of IUAC. This indigenous technology along with cryogen-free technology and Artificial intelligence will lead to the lighter and cheaper whole-body scanner which can be mounted on a mobile van for rural healthcare in the future.

The basic objective of the Inter-University Accelerator Centre (IUAC) is to provide front-ranking accelerator-based research facilities for internationally competitive research in multi-disciplinary areas. In the quest for innovation & capacity building in the areas of accelerator-driven research, IUAC is India’s premier laboratory for university researchers. IUAC provides necessary powerful tools used by scientists to understand the mysteries of matter, energy, space, and time by looking at the processes that work at the bigger, smaller, and faster scales.

The Centre, as the first inter-university research institute within the University system, has been playing a crucial role with its Scientific and Technical staff having dual responsibility of facilitating cutting-edge research for a large user community as well as conducting their own research and development to open new vistas of advanced research activities.

Emphasis is laid on encouraging group activities and sharing of the facilities at the Centre in synergy with those existing elsewhere. The Centre has designed and commissioned various sophisticated accelerator systems and experimental facilities, in project mode, involving several universities/institutes for research in the areas of Nuclear Physics, Materials Science, Ion-Molecule Collisions, Atomic Physics, Radiation Biology, Radiation Physics, and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (Geo-chronology).

More than 700 research groups from Universities, Institutes, and Laboratories, from India and abroad, have been using the facilities round the clock, seven days a week, for nearly three decades. The facilities also require a lot of custom-made electronics, interlocks, and control systems solutions which are not available off the shelf and whenever provided by companies are very expensive. There is a need for in-house development of these dedicated electronic modules for the control and interlock of these instruments.

There are requirements for many types of high voltage/high current power supplies. IUAC has developed in-house expertise for many such necessities such as nuclear experiments-related electronics, vacuum interlocks, radiation safety interlocks, magnet power supplies, high/low power RF amplifiers, etc.    


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(Onkareshwar Pandey is Founder, Editor in Chief & CEO, Indian Observer Post and former Senior Group Editor- Rashtriya Sahara (Hindi & Urdu) and also former Editor, (News), ANI. http://bit.ly/2mh7hih Email - SMS- 9910150119)


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