MRI-Guided Robot: Open Magnets to ABB's Lab Role

An MRI-guided robot works where most machines cannot, inside or right next to the strong magnet of an MRI scanner. Doctors want it there because MRI shows soft tissue and bone marrow in detail without ionizing radiation, so a robot that aims a needle from those images could make biopsies and tumour treatments safer. This post goes from the start of interventional MRI and the first MR-compatible robots built in Japan, Boston and Calgary to the bone biopsy and brain robots now in trials. It also explains why an ordinary industrial arm such as an ABB robot stays outside the magnet room.

Staff position a patient on the table of an MRI scanner before an MRI-guided focused ultrasound treatment in Vietnam, 2016. Photo: Bác sĩ Nguyễn Minh Đức / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From the first body scans to the first MR-safe robots

Raymond Damadian and his colleagues performed the first MRI body scan of a human on 3 July 1977, and in the same decade a team led by John Mallard built the first full body scanner at the University of Aberdeen. Doctors soon wanted to use the images while they worked on a patient as well. Interventional MRI now covers biopsies, tumour resections and thermal ablation, but every tool near the scanner must be non-magnetic, often titanium, and many early suites used open magnets of around 0.2 tesla so staff could reach the patient.

The Mark One MRI scanner built at Aberdeen, on display at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. Photo: AndyGaskell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

One of the best known early setups was at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Its GE Signa SP scanner, a 0.5 tesla magnet split into two facing rings, left a gap of 560 mm in which two surgeons could stand, and the hospital recorded more than 500 cases with it in the six years to February 2000. In Japan, a 1995 paper from the Medical Precision Engineering lab at the University of Tokyo described an MRI-compatible needle insertion manipulator for neurosurgery, tested in vitro. It was one of the first attempts to let a machine hold the needle inside the scanner.

A 1.5 tesla MRI scanner with its patient table, the kind of closed bore a robot has to work in. Photo: Sergei.Verzilin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Around 2000 a team led by Chinzei, working with Japan's AIST and the Brigham team, built a surgical assist robot for the Signa SP. It had five degrees of freedom driven by piezoelectric motors, sat on top of the magnet between the coils, and reached into the imaging area with two long arms that guided the surgeon's instrument. In Calgary, the neuroArm project went further: two manipulators with force sensors, controlled by a surgeon at a workstation, designed for both microsurgery and stereotactic biopsy inside the MRI. IMRIS acquired the neuroArm assets in 2010.

An intraoperative MRI suite, with the scanner behind open doors beyond the operating table. Photo: SoccerNathan9 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Bone and brain robots in the scanner today

A robot in the bore cannot use ordinary electric motors or steel, so newer designs run on air pressure and read their position with optical sensors. On 9 October 2026 Children's National Hospital reported that Kevin Cleary had presented an MRI-safe bone biopsy robot and drill, built with the Johns Hopkins University Urology Robotics Program led by Dan Stoianovici, at the 15th Interventional MRI Symposium. Clinicians place the device over the target area, and motorised axes aim the needle guide and set the insertion depth.

The iMRI suite at The Canberra Hospital, an operating room built around MRI imaging, in 2016. Photo: SoccerNathan9 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The patient goes into the scanner for targeting and confirmation, then comes out while the biopsy is done through the guide, which stays locked on the planned path. In the first clinical case the team took three core samples from a lesion in the right femur of an 8 year old with a pneumatic drill, in under two hours and without complications, and a second patient has since been treated. Our post on pediatric robotic surgery covers that first case and other robots built for children.

Bone marrow biopsy needles in their sterile packs, the kind of tool an MRI biopsy robot lines up. Photo: Thirteen Of Clubs / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

On 2 September 2026 AiM Medical Robotics announced a $2 million Phase II SBIR grant from the US National Cancer Institute for an intraoperative MRI-guided neurosurgery robot for ablating brain tumours, which is the other main use under study. The system pairs MRI thermometry, which shows tissue temperature during treatment, with robot control, so the patient does not need to move between imaging and treatment. A first in human feasibility study is planned in the AMIGO suite at Brigham and Women's Hospital from September 2026 to August 2028, led by founder Gregory Fischer.

A Siemens MAGNETOM Skyra 3 tesla scanner at the Taiwan Mind and Brain Imaging Center, 2024. Photo: Yu tptw / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What MRI-guided robots still have to solve

ABB industrial robots cannot work in this space. Arms such as the IRB 1300 or the YuMi IRB 14000 are built from metal and driven by electric servo motors, which the magnet would pull on and which would disturb the images. Where ABB robots could fit is outside the magnet room. ABB has shown a mobile YuMi concept for hospital laboratories, and robots like it could one day handle the sample tubes and slides that a biopsy produces. That is a possibility, and no MRI biopsy project has announced such a link.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, in a hospital lab corridor. Photo: ABB

With a robot like this, a child or adult gets an accurate biopsy without CT radiation, and the target is checked on the same scanner that found it. The cost is scanner time, since a procedure that ties up an MRI suite for two hours keeps other patients waiting. Both the Children's National system and the AiM robot are still in pilot or feasibility studies, so wider use depends on more cases, published results and regulatory clearance. Hospitals would also need staff trained to plan the needle path on the images and to run a robot in the magnet room.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept loading a centrifuge, a lab task that follows sample collection. Photo: ABB

Air driven motors are harder to control precisely than electric ones, every part must be tested for heating and image distortion, and teams need radiologists, surgeons and engineers working together, as the Children's National group points out. Its bone biopsy work was partly funded by the US National Institutes of Health. For patients at home, the change would be fewer trips between scanners and operating rooms. Earlier posts on this site cover prostate biopsy robots and brain implant surgery, two neighbouring fields where robots also guide needles from scan images.

An ABB YuMi robot working with small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

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