🧲 🧠 Why Low Field Neuro 2025?

Producing low-field and ultra-low-field Magnetic Resonance (MRI) imaging requires specific expertise in a field that is still largely unexplored by major equipment manufacturers.

This expertise is currently held by a few university teams that have voluntarily chosen to invest in this area.

The goal of this event is to bring together "low-field" expertise from around the world.

The multiple exchanges should help to:

🢂 promote the potential applications of the technique in many fields, such as neuroepidemiology and even emergency and humanitarian medicine.

Neuroepidemiology is a powerful biological and medical analysis strategy, leveraging data acquired from large cohorts of patients for whom different types of data are collected and analyzed.

Thanks to powerful statistical algorithms, it is thus possible to better understand pathologies affecting the brain, such as neurodegenerative diseases and their prevalence, and to define new diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic strategies.

By offering new biomarkers for pathologies, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) occupies a prime position to complement the arsenal of longitudinal studies that can be carried out on a population scale, thanks to its non-invasive nature, its very good spatial resolution in deep organs, the richness and easy modulation of its contrasts, and its ability to provide volumetric information.

🢂 contribute objectively to the debates related to the deployment of imaging in medical deserts, both in industrialized countries and in the global south.

Indeed, MRI is a difficult technique to access, as instruments based on the use of intense-field magnets are expensive both to purchase and to maintain.

They are currently reserved for radiology departments in major hospitals and clinics. Its use as a tool for neuroepidemiology studies therefore requires a real effort of "democratization". 

With the necessary reduction in healthcare costs and the emergence of new, powerful image denoising algorithms using artificial intelligence, we are witnessing a renewed interest in the use of low-field or very low-field imaging.

Major equipment manufacturers are once again building low-field instruments (<1T), and new companies are offering very low-field instruments (<0.1T).