It can generate a 9.4 Tesla magnetic field

Sep 18, 2009 10:58 GMT  ·  By

In a strange turn of events, we note that it's not the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that has the most powerful magnets, but a Magnetic Resonance Imaging Machine. The monstrosity is apparently able to generate a 9.4 Tesla magnetic field, and boasts a magnet that weighs 45 tons. To its praise, the LHC indeed features thousands of smaller magnets, but still, it's pretty impressive to see such a massive one on a medical machine. For comparison, it takes a 17 Tesla magnetic field to levitate a mouse in the lab.

The MRI machine, Wired reports, is located at the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC), where it is used to look deep inside the human brain. It does its job with so much accuracy, that it is already starting to provide experts with new insight into our cortices. This is by far the most powerful such scanner to be used on humans anywhere in the world. It can detect such things as the level of energy consumption in neurons, overall oxygen use, as well as sodium concentrations in the cortices.

These three factors are the most important ones on the so-called “bioscale.” Together, they can provide an accurate estimate of just how healthy brain cells are. The machine could eventually be used to pinpoint signs of neurodegenerative disorders in the human brain, long before conventional symptoms become apparent to researchers. Conditions such as Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis could thus be caught in time, and treated early on, with far better results than today.

“Without this magnet we wouldn’t have gotten this far so fast. It would have taken years and years to develop the insight and understanding to overcome the hurdles using the more widely available 3-T diagnostic MRI,” the Director of the UIC Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, Keith Thulborn, said recently in a press release. According to the expert, only four such MRI machines exist around the world. The average one, of the kind that can be found in regular hospitals, can only generate about a 3 Tesla magnetic field.

The average refrigerator, for instance, has the ability to produce only 0.05 Tesla. Still, this is not by far the most powerful magnet in the world. The record for the strongest, man-made, continuous magnetic field of all times is held by a device capable of producing a 45 Tesla force, Wired reports.