Plenary talk — Superconducting magnetic resonance imaging technology

The successfully commercial application of superconductivity is the superconducting magnet in the magnetic resonance imaging system, a ca. $7 billion business global annually, now ca. 35000 systems used around the world and service millions medical imaging scanning every day. As the most costly part of the system superconducting magnet has many special requirements in order to perform the job, such as field of view (FOV), field strength, field uniformity, field persistence, stray field, shielding of external disturbance and boil-off of the Liquid Helium, etc, some of these requirements are contradiction, so usually a trade off is needed by the design and manufacturing. Alltech Medical Systems successfully developed 1.5T superconducting magnet for MRI system on Jan. 7, 2009 in Chengdu and over 100 systems are used in hospital saving life. Developments of 3T and 7T (small bore) magnets and MRI systems are also in progress.