Portable Handheld MRI Sans Magnet

Recently scientists at Berkeley have discovered a way in which they can produce MRI scans without the use of magnets and can have temporal resolutions of .1 seconds and eventually spatials resolutions on the nanoliter scale. The technique, rather than using large superconducting magnetic coils as both the polarizer and detector, uses vapor chambers of polarized rubidium gas that respond to the depolarization of the target atoms by depolarizing themselves. This can very easily be measured by this magneto-optical detector device and the group eventually hopes to shrink the device to a battery operated handheld unit that could be used for onsite medical imaging.

I think it is awesome to think that in the future, the EMT's at the scene of a car accident will be able to internally image someone and be able to see in real time, the movement of blood internal to the patient and diagnose the level of internal injury/bleeding before the person ever leaves the pavement.