[theptip]

At $20k estimated cost, you are getting into territory where the TAM of non-medical uses may be higher.

Sports physio / trainers would kill to be able to do regular MRI on their athletes. Being able to do pre/post workout imaging, and the kind of training programs this level of visibility would unlock, are quite exciting.

Assuming you can generalize from brain to whole-body, I think you could sell one of these to every major sports team in the country, and making it a non-medical device (ie skipping the FDA) would let you iterate much faster. A couple more halvings in price and this is accessible to every sports physio office and gym in the country.

Very cool!

[haldujai]

This wouldn’t work.

I interpret musculoskeletal MRI studies in my practice. Small joint (what this would be used for) ligaments and tendons are incredibly difficult to see and assess even at ultra high res studies performs on 3T magnets.

With the spatial resolution of this you would be way better off using ultrasound.

[extrapickles]

It would help with scale if practically every well equipped gym and veterinarian had one. Also, a large supply of used machines will eventually exist so even poorer locations can afford one.

This might have some interesting industrial applications as well (checking composites for defects, food packaging, etc). There might be some other applications that are currently unknown as MRI machines are too expensive (eg: checking beams in bridges).