Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans are due an update: they’re expensive, time-consuming, and therefore not used as often as they could be.
These days, MRIs are most commonly used to do tests of the brain or spinal cord, and diagnose conditions such as cancer; however they could play a big role in preventing people getting seriously sick in the first place, saving more lives — and money.
“If you catch pancreatic cancer early, you’re 10 times more likely to survive it,” says Erik Jacobsson, CEO of Swedish startup Corsmed, which has been working on making MRIs cheaper and quicker for five years.
Corsmed has developed software that can be used with any MRI scanner to reduce scan time from 45 minutes to just 2-3 minutes — and, says Jacobsson, can deliver better results than the most expensive equipment, even when used on the cheapest hardware.
“About 50k-100k lives are lost every day to disease that would be treatable, if you found it in time.”
The challenge is finding the budget to fund preventative healthcare. In 2020, EU countries spent on average 3.5% of their healthcare budgets on preventative healthcare, whilst one year later, in 2021, that number had increased to 6% mostly due to the rise in Covid vaccinations.
“Today there are around 100m scans done globally a year, but to cover what’s needed in today’s reactive healthcare, you’d need to increase that number to 1bn. To make it available as a preventive measure you would need to increase it by a likely tenfold again,” Jacobsson says.
The technology breakthrough
Traditional MRI scans use a machine that applies radiofrequency (RF) pulses, magnetic field gradients and timing to collect signals. These signals are then processed into a black-and-grey image, where different shades represent various tissues. For example, fat and water give off different signals, appearing in lighter or darker shades, which helps doctors see inside the body without surgery.
Corsmed’s technology collects a lot more data, says Jacobsson. “What you essentially get is an array of data and tissue properties in each pixel. This array of data describes perfectly what that tissue is. You are essentially going from single dimension to multi-dimension.”
These data points help doctors more confidently identify whether they are looking at a tumour and what type it is.
“We replace the traditional signal processing pipeline with a much more sophisticated physics-based and compute-heavy method,” Jacobsson says. “This enables the use of entirely new sequences which can pick up far more information per time unit.”
Tackling false positives and negatives
MRI scans are costly — in the UK, they range from £300-600, and in the US, the average is $1,325 per scan. Waiting times can also be long; in the UK, more than 25% of patients wait six weeks or more for an MRI, well above the NHS’s target of 1%, according to a 2023 report.
Increased use of MRI scans has faced criticism, particularly around the risk of false positives and false negatives. Critics worry that screenings may uncover issues that aren’t actual problems, leading to unnecessary follow-up investigations and diverting resources from treating genuinely ill patients.
Jacobsson thinks this would be mitigated if MRI scans were used continuously through longitudinal studies — research that collects data from the same patients over time.
“This approach helps predict and understand how health conditions evolve, which is crucial for reducing false positives and negatives in a preventative system,” he explains.
“The problem is that people talk about applying today’s technology to tomorrow’s solutions. Our technology will eventually eliminate false positives and negatives entirely,” he adds.
Going to market
Corsmed has just raised $3.5m in seed funding, led by Swedish VC Luminar Ventures and Greek VC Big Pi Ventures, to commercialise the technology
The startup’s software has already been used on its first product, an MRI simulator, to train, upskill, and assess students and medical staff at cancer hospitals and research institutions. Corsmed already has over 50 customers, including the Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester and CNI College and Gurnick Academy in California. More than 80k hours of real MRI scanner time have been run on Corsmed’s simulator.
However, to be able to use its MRI technology on patients in public hospitals in the US, Corsmed needs approval from the country’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which it is planning to apply for in 2025.
For Jacobsson, time is of the essence.
“Until we can make MRI routinely accessible for everyone, we’ll continue to see preventable mortality pile up. Imagine a world where routine, whole-body quantitative scans can detect cancer and other life-threatening diseases at their earliest stages, giving everyone a fair shot at a long and healthy life. This is the future we’re building toward,” he says.
“But for every two months we are delayed, it costs 60 times 80k lives, give or take. That is hard for me to accept.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/breakthrough-mri-scans-corsmed-news/
