An MRI is one of medicine’s most powerful cameras, and one of its slowest. A single scan can run half an hour, often too slow for the machine to keep pace with what it is trying to see. Researchers at Israel’s Technion have now found a way to speed it up sharply, and the fix is not a stronger magnet or a more expensive machine. It is mathematics, with a careful dose of AI.

Their method, called ELITE, rebuilds a usable image about once a second, where a conventional dynamic scan manages one every one to two minutes. The work was published in Nature Communications in May, and the Technion presented it to the public on June 22. The target is breast cancer, and the payoff is not only comfort or speed for its own sake. It lets the scan capture something it used to miss.

Dynamic breast MRI works by injecting a contrast dye and watching how tissue takes it up. That pattern is part of the diagnosis: cancerous tissue tends to draw the dye in quickly and release it quickly, while benign tissue usually fills more slowly and steadily. Reading the rhythm well needs fine detail and fine timing at the same moment, and until now the scanner had to trade one for the other. At one image a second, tested on 54........

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