World-first at Charité: Birth in Open MRI

An interdisciplinary team of scientists from the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin have achieved a world-first, the birth of a child in an “open” MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner that allows a mother-to-be to fit fully into the machine. Through the cooperation of the obstetrician Dr. Christan Bamberg, the radiologist Dr. Ulf Teichgräber and the engineer and project manager Felix Güttler, unique images of the baby inside the mother and the child's movements in the birth canal up to the point of the exit of the head were obtained. The birth that took place in the scanner went smoothly and both mother and baby were in good health.

The joint project was a two-year research and development project of the radiological technically-oriented working group on “open high-field MRI". The team built a special “open MRI” scanner, a new type of machine whose open structure had the necessary space for the mother to give birth. One of the innovations of this new system was the creation of a new fetal monitoring system. This allowed the monitoring of the child's heartbeat on MRI during the birth process. The open high-field MRI (Philips Panorama HFO) is a novel device whose design allows easy access to mother and child enabling the researchers to study in greater detail how the baby moves through the mother’s pelvis and down the birth canal.

source: Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin