The National Magnetic Resonance Research Center (UMRAM) is coordinating a Horizon Europe Twinning project with partners in Germany and the UK. The project, “Twinning of Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Institutes” – “MRITwins” for short – will be funded with a total budget of 1.5 M€ over three years.
The EU’s Twinning program is intended to “foster networking activities between research institutions from Widening countries and first-rate counterparts from EU Member States or Associated Countries,” bringing together resources and the expertise of the partnering organizations. For the MRITwins project, Bilkent is partnering with the University of Nottingham, Medical University of Vienna and the German Cancer Research Center at Freiburg University Hospital.
The project’s principal investigators are Prof. Ergin Atalar, director of UMRAM and a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, along with Prof. Mark Ladd, Prof. Elmar Laistler, Prof. Maxim Zaitsev and Prof. Richard Bowtell from the partner institutions.
The project involves activities to promote networking between the three institutions as well as a specific research goal in the field of MR engineering. The networking activities will include long-term training visits between the project partners and workshops for exchanging skills and knowledge.
MR engineering is a research field in which novel hardware and accompanying algorithms are developed for MRI scanners. The scope of the MRITwins project encompasses research in which the collaborating partners will employ their expertise to work on re-engineering MRI scanners with open-source gradient-arrays and RF transmit-arrays: an area of investigation that has the potential to revolutionize MRI scanners.
Based on the initial results obtained by the researchers, the project members plan to submit new, large-scale proposals in the same field. This long-term collaborative approach will not only improve the research capabilities of the partnering members but also will have a positive impact on the science in this field.
