UMRAM of Bilkent University will coordinate a Horizon Europe Twinning project with partners in Germany and the UK.
The Horizon Europe project proposal entitled “Twinning of Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Institutes” with the acronym “MRITwins” successfully passed the evaluation phase with an almost perfect 14.5/15 score. It was chosen to be funded with a total budget of 1.5 M€ for three years. In this project, Bilkent as the coordinator will partner with the German Cancer Research Center (DFKZ), Freiburg University Hospital, and the University of Nottingham under a research program known as Twinning. The project’s principal investigators are Ergin Atalar, Mark Ladd, Maxim Zaitsev, and Richard Bowtell. The program aims to bring together resources and the expertise of the partnering institutes to create research networks.
The project involves carefully planned activities for the networking of partnering institutes as well as a specific research goal in the field of MR Engineering. Networking activities include long-term training visits between the project partners and workshops for exchanging skills and knowledge.
MR Engineering is the research field where novel hardware and accompanying algorithms are developed for MRI scanners. The scope of the MRITwins project includes research work where expert project partners will explore the topic of “re-engineering MRI scanners with open-source gradient-arrays and RF transmit-arrays.” Based on the initial research results obtained in the MRITwins project, the project members plan to cooperate in the future by submitting new large-scale research proposals in the same field. This long-term collaboration approach will not only improve the research capacity of the partnering members but also will have a positive impact on the state of science in this field. The proposed research topic has the potential to revolutionize MRI scanners with new features introduced by open-source gradient-array and RF transmit-array systems.