USC Team 3D-Prints Custom MRI Sensors That Give Infants Four Times Better Scans

A team at the University of Southern California has developed a way to 3D-print patient-specific MRI receiver coils fast enough to matter in a clinical setting. The finished sensors cost roughly $30 each, take under 10 minutes to produce, and deliver about four times the image contrast of the standard commercial coils currently used on children.

The secret lies in the materials and the process. The team prints conductive silver ink directly onto a thermoplastic elastomer: a soft, stretchable substrate with mechanical properties close to human skin. The resulting coil flexes 5% to 10%, so it moves with the patient instead of pressing rigidly against a small chest or head. That alone changes the signal quality you get from a squirming infant.

Why Standard Coils Fail on Small Patients

Most hospital MRI coils are designed for adult anatomy. When a child or infant lies inside the scanner, the coil sits too far from the tissue it is meant to read. The gap produces weaker signal and noisier images. In cardiac imaging, that noise can obscure the very structures the doctor needs to see.

Because each USC coil begins as a digital file, clinicians can adjust dimensions to a specific patient and reprint almost immediately. For a growing child, that means new coils at different stages of development, each one custom-fit to their current body shape.

Built Across Multiple Labs

The project combined expertise from two USC labs plus outside clinical input. Professor Sunil Kumar's group worked on flexible electronics and wearable sensors. The Dynamic Imaging Science Center, led by Krishna Shrinivas Nayak, contributed its motion-capable MRI methods. John Wood, director of cardiovascular MRI at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, provided the clinical perspective on imaging young patients, including real-time fetal heart imaging.

The cross-disciplinary setup was deliberate. "We need environments where different ideas can collide," said Kumar. "This project wouldn't have happened without access to the MRI and conversations with cardiologists, radiologists and imaging scientists."

Speed and Cost That Could Scale

Traditional custom medical devices take weeks to fabricate through a manufacturer. The USC process collapses that to minutes. At $30 per coil, the economics are entirely different from buying a library of specialized commercial coils that still do not fit every child.

The team also tested the sensors on fast-moving anatomy, including a beating heart. Paired with specialized imaging sequences at USC's Michelson Center, the coils captured dynamic images with enough clarity to track motion in real time. That combination, custom-fit sensor plus advanced sequence, is where the contrast improvement comes from.

A Broader Pattern in Pediatric Devices

USC's work follows a clear trend in pediatric research: redesign the fabrication process so devices are built directly around a child's anatomy instead of forcing a child to fit a device made for an adult.

At the University of Lincoln, researchers 3D-printed a sensor-embedded prosthetic arm for a toddler under two, basing the design on a 3D scan of the child's forearm. At University College London, a team built a small 3D-printed sensor to test brain responses in newborns, designing the device to sit safely on an infant's face and testing it on babies just days old. Each project uses 3D printing to reach precision at scales standard manufacturing cannot match.

For USC's MRI coils, the next step is broader clinical testing. If the results hold at scale, the technology could let smaller hospitals produce patient-specific imaging accessories on demand without a specialized supply chain. That would be a meaningful shift: from ordering equipment off a catalog to printing it in-house when the patient arrives.