Overview

According to a 2008 report from the World Health Organization, 90% of the world does not have access to MRI. This is further compounded by the fact that the number of scanners per million people in the two most populous countries, China and India, is significantly less than in the OECD countries. While the density of MRI scanners is high in OECD countries such as the USA, the density is highly non-uniform and correlates strongly with socio-economic factors. These statistics require dedicated solutions to meet the challenge of access while maintaining quality at an affordable cost.

In line with WHO's definition of access, the workshop would create a platform to pose these challenges and elicit potential solutions to bridge the gap between the high-quality sophisticated MR system available in high-income demographics to an accessible MR system that maintains the same levels of quality. This would be based on four pillars:

• Understanding global MR need: access to understanding global and local clinical needs defined across demographics, technology, cultural, economic and infrastructural constraints.
• Open-source tools: access to build, distribute and deploy. The workshop would focus on the development and deployment of open-source comprehensive MR algorithm development frameworks. This would aid in democratizing technology in a vendor-agnostic manner.
• Intelligent imaging: access to pragmatic hardware engineering, methods and interpretations. The workshop would discuss the challenge of MR imaging with constraints placed on the six parameters for access defined by WHO: availability, affordability, accessibility, appropriateness, acceptability, and quality. This will also include ready-to-implement pragmatic MR clinical solutions.
• Quantitative imaging: access to parametric MR to enable informed decision-making. The workshop would involve discussions on enabling multi-parametric MR imaging as part of a robust clinical decision making framework.

The workshop would include experts in the field to lay out critical challenges to accessible MRI and provide an overview of their vision to address them. The workshop will be an immersion for attendees to understand global needs, learn about the related technical and clinical MR challenges, and gather information on existing and disruptive solutions delivered by the speakers. Most importantly, the attendees would also be provided with open-source tools in their areas of discussion and expertise that they may choose to employ in their practice. At the end of the workshop, the attendees are expected to be equipped with a basic understanding of the expansive challenge of accessible MRI, specific knowledge of the strategies in their areas of interest within this topic, and be able to embark on research in that area with/without the support of the tools provided in the workshop.

Target Audience

We aim for the content of the workshop to address basic scientists, clinicians, health policy experts related to medical imaging, and industry partners. This has been devised to enable an active interaction amongst these groups to learn, debate, and understand a well-rounded view of accessible MRI. This would highlight cutting-edge research in the areas of clinical need definition, hardware development, software tools, and sustainable MR bio-design, eventually resulting in a roadmap for a comprehensive accessible solution.

The range of expertise of attendees will likely span all of MR science, including (but not limited to) MR physics, biomedical engineering, electrical engineering/computer science; radiologists, safety experts from FDA, health policy advisors from government and internationally reputed agencies, and experts from abutting technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data. The range of training will also span all of MR: basic and clinical scientists, clinical radiologists, basic and clinical postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, MR enthusiasts, existing and potentially diverse end-users, and MR technologists. The hope is also to engage startups, industry/hospital partners, and government stakeholders.

Educational Objectives

Upon completion of this activity, participants should be able to:

• Identify and recognize the need for accessible MR;
• Outline and summarize anatomy-wise MR clinical needs of underserved populations;
• Explain MR innovation processes through examples from the past and needs of the future;
• Identify, apply, and assess open-source tools for MR innovation inclusive of hardware, acquisition, reconstruction, and deep learning;
• Recognize and evaluate the roles of artificial intelligence and quantitative imaging in the development of scalable comprehensive MR solutions for large populations; and
• Identify clinical needs and solutions for effective implementation of affordable and accessible MRI solutions that are already available or in the pipeline.