Metasurfaces provide a new way for building magnetic resonance imaging scanners

We reveal that the unique properties of ultrathin metasurface resonators can improve dramatically magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We place a metasurface formed by an array of metallic wires inside a scanner under the studied object and achieve a substantial enhancement of the radiofrequency magnetic field by means of subwavelength near-field manipulation with metasurface, also allowing to improve scanner sensitivity, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and image resolution.