How The World’s First Open Source MRI Happened

You wouldn’t think that a hang gliding accident could start a revolution in medicine. But when a teenager fell 150 feet into a lake several years ago, the subsequent events that sparked a revolutionary new diagnostic method, what I am calling the first open source MRI. The story is a fascinating look at what one family can accomplish if they keep asking questions and getting the right people into a room to talk to each other.

MRIs are big proprietary machines made by a dozen large equipment manufacturers (such as Siemens, Hitachi and Toshiba) and cost plenty: think of them as what IBM mainframes of the 1980s were when PCs first started entering the corporate ecosystem. You have to train people how to operate them and interpret their scans, and once they are setup, you have to run them more or less continuously to realize the return on your investment. If your hospital or imaging center buys equipment from one vendor, you are pretty much locked into that vendor’s line of accessories and upgrades. And they are designed for very specific diagnostic situations. One of them that they aren’t very good at is looking at spinal cord abnormalities...