MRI scans are loud and tedious. AI could at least make them fast. | Photo by Sergei Bobylev / TASS via Getty Images
If you’ve ever had an MRI scan before, you’ll know how unsettling the experience can be. You’re placed in a claustrophobia-inducing tube and asked to stay completely still for up to an hour while unseen hardware whirs, creaks, and thumps around you like a medical poltergeist. New research, though, suggests AI can help with this predicament by making MRI scans four times faster, getting patients in and out of the tube quicker.
The work is a collaborative project called fastMRI between Facebook’s AI research team (FAIR) and radiologists at NYU Langone Health. Together, the scientists trained a machine learning model on pairs of low-resolution and high-resolution MRI scans, using this model to “predict” what final MRI scans look like from…