Hyperfine Inc., a Guilford-based biotechnology company, said Wednesday it has received a $3.7 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to advance development of its AI-powered portable MRI technology for neonatal brain imaging.
The funding, which runs through 2028, will support Hyperfine’s work to enhance its Swoop system to better evaluate neurodevelopment in infants and young children in low-resource settings. Swoop is the first portable MRI for brain imaging approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The research is part of the UNITY project, a global initiative led by King’s College London that seeks to expand access to objective assessments of early brain development.
Millions of infants born prematurely or facing malnutrition and other health challenges are at heightened risk for impaired neurodevelopment, project officials said. In many underserved regions, clinicians rely on indirect measures, such as physical growth or behavioral tests, to gauge brain development, methods that researchers say can miss early signs of concern.
Hyperfine says its portable MRI system offers a scalable, cost-effective alternative that can provide timely, data-driven insight to guide treatment.
With the new grant, Hyperfine and King’s College plan to build AI-based tools to improve image clarity and diagnostic reliability for neonatal patients, addressing challenges such as motion and low signal quality. The goal is to support consistent, high-quality imaging that can be deployed worldwide.
“Through our ongoing partnership with Hyperfine, we are now imaging the developing brain where it was once impossible,” said Professor Steve Williams, principal investigator for UNITY at King’s College London.
Williams said the collaboration will help deliver a low-cost, scalable method for directly assessing neurodevelopment. According to the project, more than 10,000 examinations have already been performed using the Swoop system, including scans of more than 6,000 infants across five continents.
The UNITY research network includes more than 40 academic and clinical centers across low-, middle- and high-income countries, including Malawi, Ghana, Zambia, Kenya, India and Pakistan.
