Earlier this year, the scientific community basked in a wave of positive media attention and well-deserved recognition, thanks to a press conference led by French President Emmanuel Macron. During this event, he showcased the groundbreaking achievement of obtaining the most precise in vivo images of the human brain to date, obtained with the Iseult 11.7 T MRI scanner.

While the spotlight has primarily focused on the broader public, MRI experts, neuroscientists, and researchers have eagerly awaited deeper insights into this project. This October, the dedicated efforts and findings of the project team were published in Nature Methods (also see related editorial), providing a comprehensive look at how these remarkable images were captured, along with related biological and behavioral tests. The publication also highlights promising prospects for further exploration of the human brain at a mesoscale resolution.

At Skope, we are particularly excited about these advancements and results, as our field cameras played an instrumental role in the development and commissioning of the Iseult system.

Franck Mauconduit from CEA NeuroSpin reflects: “I want to emphasize how important it is to use a Skope field camera for such a system. It would have been so much more difficult to reach this point without it. This is said for all other such projects to come.”

So, how was Skope’s technology utilized in this project? Skope tools measure the dynamic magnetic field of an MR scanner. This is the field responsible for encoding/capturing the image. In new systems such as the one developed by CEA, characterizing the dynamic field throughout scanner development is necessary to understand the performance of the system and interactions between system components. With this knowledge, researchers were able to optimize both hardware and software components of the scanner. Published in detail in this MAGMA article, the researchers demostrate that they used a Skope field camera for measuring field stability (Figure 2), external interference shielding (Figure 3), gradient performance (GIRF, Figure 8), and the interaction of the gradients with a prototype bore component (Figure 9).

This work has been done within the scope of the AROMA project.