A collaborative project between IBM Research, a unit of IBM of Armonk, NY, and the Center for Probing the Nanoscale at Stanford University in Stanford, CA, has demonstrated a prototype MRI unit with volume resolution 100 million times finer than conventional MRI.
The advancement was enabled by magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM), which relies on detecting ultrasmall magnetic forces. In addition to its high resolution, the imaging technique is chemically specific, can image below surfaces, and is nondestructive to sensitive biological materials.
By extending MRI to a finer resolution, researchers noted that they essentially have created a microscope that, with further development, may ultimately be powerful enough to unravel the structure and interactions of proteins, paving the way for new advances in personalized healthcare and targeted medicine.
Details on the discovery are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (January 12, 2009).
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