Grant: Idea to Innovation

Fetal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the standard modality for accurately diagnosing fetal abnormalities. Diagnostic accuracy of fetal MRI is currently limited by artifacts caused by maternal-fetal motion, among other sources, which distort and degrade the images, inhibiting their diagnostic utility. The result is that most fetal MRI scans need to be repeated up to 4 times per patient until a clean image is obtained. This repetition is time and cost consuming for the Canadian health care system. It delays treatments, and increases the risk of fetuses being born with life-long disorders that impact their quality of life and require constant costly medical care. We urgently need fetal MRI sequences and algorithms to be developed to altogether avoid and remove the current artifacts. However, such development also requires ample and repeated testing, which is extremely time consuming and costly to do with human participants. Our solution is a device (aka phantom) that moves and looks like the human fetus within the pregnant abdomen. It forgoes the need for human volunteers for technical development, allowing to do accurate repeated testing as often and for as long as needed in one session. It promises to expedite technical development at a fraction of the current cost, while minimizing the need for repeated scans. Taken together, the fetal phantom will drastically cut down the cost of technical development as well as the cost of fetal diagnosis with MRI, thereby revolutionizing the fetal MRI field and fetal healthcare.