Portable magnetic resonance imaging (pMRI) is on the cusp of transforming neuroscience research. No longer will research participants have to travel to a scanner in an academic or hospital setting; instead, the technology can come to them. In addition, user-friendly advancements with pMRI are facilitating study of the brain by researchers who previously lacked access to conventional MRI.
While this technological breakthrough may widen access and facilitate greater inclusion in field-based research, pMRI also introduces novel ethical and legal issues, according to University of Minnesota Law professors Francis Shen, JD, PhD, and Susan Wolf, JD. Shen and Wolf, along with Frances Lawrenz, PhD, are the co-principal investigators of a five-year project focused on pMRI and based in the Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences at the University of Minnesota.
“For the full benefit of portable MRI technology to be realized, we need guardrails,” says Shen. “The rapid development of the technology has outpaced consideration of the ethical and legal implications.”
Addressing challenges of rapidly expanding technology
To date, MRI research primarily has been conducted in major research institutions and hospitals. It is expensive and requires skilled technicians. In contrast, pMRI allows researchers to conduct MRI research in community settings with smaller, much less expensive equipment and requires less training to operate the scanners.
“You can scan at the push of a button,” says Shen. “That opens the use of MRI to a much larger universe of researchers who don’t have to be experts in MRI. That might include researchers in law, economics, marketing, criminal justice, education, politics, and more. The brain is important in every field that focuses on human behavior.”
Wolf says that portable MRI could make research much more inclusive of rural and historically underrepresented populations, but broad democratization of the technology introduces new challenges. “Being able to set up a scanner in a high school gymnasium or a remote village or even someone’s home raises significant issues. We need to make sure that the wider pool of researchers with access to this technology can handle those issues,” she says. Those challenges include data privacy and security, use of artificial intelligence, safety in the scanning environment, and ensuring research participant engagement, to name a few.
Finding Solutions Through Diverse Perspectives
To address the ethical, legal, and societal implications of pMRI, Shen, Wolf, and Lawrenz convened a national working group of interdisciplinary experts to drive guidance on the topic. With support from the National Institute of Mental Health’s BRAIN Initiative at the National Institutes of Health, they brought together Michael Garwood, PhD, Paul Tuite, MD, and Damien Fair, PA-C, PhD, from the University of Minnesota, plus leaders from Columbia University, Duke University, Emory University, Harvard Medical School, Mass General Brigham, and multiple other universities.
The group met over multiple years to identify core ethical and legal issues raised by pMRI research, guide the project’s empirical research, and develop consensus recommendations. These recommendations were published in June 2024 in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences. This winter, the group’s work culminated in a symposium of nine articles, including targeted analyses and further operational recommendations, published in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics.
“The composition of the working group and the process led to very high-quality recommendations,” says Lawrenz. “We included experts from neuroscience, engineering, physics, ethics, and law, who contributed diverse perspectives that helped generate comprehensive and deeply thoughtful ideas.”
Supporting Quality Implementation
The working group’s most recent publications include a unique checklist that helps researchers operationalize the recommendations for pMRI research outside an academic or hospital setting. The checklist is organized into stages for creating the research protocol, preparing for scanning, conducting scanning, and engaging the community after scanning. “This is a whole different kind of checklist than is usual in neuroimaging research,” says Wolf. “It’s not just about safety; it’s a powerful tool to consider the ethical and legal issues every step of the process. It’s an exciting contribution that we believe will help researchers, Institutional Review Boards, and research participants.”
Community engagement is another cornerstone of the working group’s recommendations, a practice not widely embraced by neuroscience research but necessary to achieve more diverse research participation. “Portable MRI technology should be used for the common good, to change health outcomes for the better,” says Shen. “We don’t want this technology to be exploitative. Partnering with the community to chart the future directions of this science is critical.”
Bringing Unique Expertise to the Project
Shen’s focus on the intersection of neuroscience and law drew him to the issues of portable MRI research. “When attorneys represent clients with suspected brain injuries, a major challenge is gaining access to technology to present evidence in court,” he says. “When I learned about highly portable MRI, I knew this could have a major legal impact in such areas as brain injury litigation and criminal defense. But for pMRI evidence to be admissible in court will require higher-quality pMRI research. Doing this research in a community context raises significant challenges.”
Wolf is particularly interested in incidental findings associated with portable MRI research. She is one of the nation’s leading experts on the topic of incidental findings in research and clinical contexts. “Whenever you image the brain, you risk identifying concerning findings that could indicate an emergency or pathology that needs clinical attention,” she says. “So, one of the working group’s recommendations is that researchers make a plan for participants to receive timely clinical evaluation in the event of an incidental finding, regardless of how far they live from a medical center or their ability to pay.”
The research team will present the working group’s findings and recommendations at multiple neuroscience, ethics, legal, and medical conferences. “As portable MRI is deployed more broadly, we hope these recommendations and guidelines will be widely embraced to advance ethical research and engage research participants,” says Wolf. “We’re grateful to the working group who provided crucial expertise to advance the field.”
Professor Francis Shen and the Consortium on Law and Values will host a webinar on “Portable MR Imaging of the Brain: Practical Challenges and Ethical Solutions for Indigenous, Rural, and Remote Communities” on Thursday, April 17, 2025, from 2-3:30 pm CDT, via Zoom (A link will be shared upon registration.) This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Register.
Listen to Prof. Francis Shen explain the project
Sponsored by the Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences; Neuroethics Canada; University of British Columbia.