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An MRI scanner is a big magnet that aligns hydrogen atoms in the body and then picks up their response signal. Such machines usually take up an entire room and cost as much as a nice house. Engineers from several labs decided to build a scanner that fits in a suitcase and released all the plans as open source.

The device is built around a permanent magnet with a field of about 50 mT — thousands of times weaker than hospital scanners, but enough to see tissue structure. The weak field means less noise and less power, so the machine runs from a regular wall outlet. The authors tested the system on phantoms — plastic containers with solutions that mimic different tissues. Geometric deviations stayed below 2 mm across the entire field of view, and measured T1 relaxation times matched reference values with an error of just 3.1%.

Two independent teams built such scanners from the published plans and obtained identical image quality. That means any university or clinic can replicate the design without costly tweaking. In the future, such devices could be used in remote areas, on ships, or in field hospitals.

Open documentation is like a cookbook with precise recipes: if you follow the instructions, the dish turns out the same in any kitchen. Same here: two different groups built the devices, and their results matched.