Purchase of Portable Human MRI System

Cardiff University is currently exploring the acquisition of a Portable Human MRI System. Our comprehensive market research indicates that there is only one supplier available for this specific technology. In light of this, we are issuing this Preliminary market engagement notice to invite expressions of interest from any suppliers who believe they can also meet our requirements.

We encourage interested parties to submit their expressions of interest by emailing rogalaa@cardiff.ac.uk no later than Thursday, November 13, 2025. In the event that we do not receive any responses, the contract will be awarded directly in accordance with Regulation 41.

Requirements:

Portable human MRI system operating at very low field strength and suitable for imaging the brain in vivo.

The system should use permanent magnets and must be modular in hardware (i.e. individual parts can be replaced with customised components, but it should come complete of gradients and an RF head coil).

The code for running MRI sequences should be open source and freely available (i.e. users must be able to program any acquisition system, not just modify parameters of available ones).

No external cooling should be required and it should be powered by a standard single-phase electricity supply.

K-space and complex imaging data need to be exportable.

- Target anatomy    Head

- Field strength (B0): between 40 and 80 mT.

- Field homogeneity (over 20 cm DSV): Less than 1000 ppm.

- Max gradient strength on each channel simultaneously: Greater than 25 mT/m.

- Max gradient strength on each channel simultaneously

- Number of Rx Channels   8 or more

- Hardware    Modular and customisable

- Software (acquisition)  Open source

- Software (reconstruction)     Open source