Cincinnati researchers want to know if MRIs can work better

The University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and UC Health are collaborating with GE HealthCare, JobsOhio, REDI Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children’s to create an MRI Research and Development Center of Excellence located on UC’s medical campus.

This center of excellence, which will be located in the former UC Health MRI Center at 321 Albert Sabin Way, is only one of a handful in the world and will focus on patient research and fostering collaboration between academia and industry, as GE HealthCare scientists will also staff the facility. 

The University of Cincinnati's Mary Mahoney, MD, told WVXU that MRIs, or magnetic resonance imaging, are highly effective at providing detailed images inside the human body, but the new center will ask questions on how to make the images even better.

"There are a lot of different advances that we think we can make if we had dedicated time to work on it," Mahoney, Benjamin Felson Chair and professor in the University of Cincinnati Department of Radiology at the College of Medicine and chief of imaging services at UC Health, said. "Better scanning techniques, more non-invasive ways that we can look at the body, more precision imaging that we could come up with better diagnoses."

"The idea behind the center is that it's intended to help us do better imaging, come up with better coils, [and] innovate better technology by putting the scientists and the clinicians together," Mahoney continued.

Studies are intended to be conducted at the research facility that would help to develop and validate next-generation MRI technology with the goal of increasing accessibility and productivity of MRI scanners and increasing precision and personalization of MRI exams.

“I think there’s a lot of development that will occur in terms of growing people, growing talent and providing that incubator for the biomedical engineering students to work with medical students and GE scientists so that we start developing a pipeline for new jobs,” Mahoney told the Cincinnati Business Courier.

Read more about the new partnership.

Read or listen to the WVXU story.

Read the Cincinnati Business Courier article.

Business Insider's Markets Insider also covered the new collaboration. Read the Markets Insider story.

Featured image of GE HealthCare Air Tech Comfort MRI machine courtesy of GE HealthCare.