Facebook's AI can generate MRI images in minutes instead of an hour

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been providing physicians with vital insights into patients' insides since their development in the 1970s. However, the machines operate at a glacially slow pace and require the patient remain perfectly still. This makes them ill-suited for use with small children (who'd have to be sedated) and people experiencing time-critical medical emergencies such as strokes. Now, after two years of research, teams from Facebook AI and NYU Langone Health have developed a neural network that can cut the amount of time people have to spend in an MRI machine from more than an hour to just a few minutes. The network, dubbed fastMRI, shortens the scanning time because it only requires a quarter as much data to resolve the image.