Progress on the technology has been chugging along since then. In 2005, Nature published the first 2-D images captured with the device. Then in 2008, Philips created a small scanner with a 3-centimeter bore, allowing it to get the first 3-D images of the cardiovascular activity of a live mouse. This meant scanning a mouse's tiny, 6-millimeter heart, fluttering at 240 beats a second. "With MPI, we can accurately image that activity," Klink said.

For the mouse study, the researchers used Resovist, a contrast agent already in human use in Europe for liver imaging, but one of the goals of the consortium is to develop an agent "optimized" for MPI. On that, consortium partners Bayer Schering Pharma AG, Miltenyi Biotec, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt are all at work, Philips said.

The Dutch electronics giant is also working with its consortium partner University of Lübeck to scale up the technology. But the company says they have to advance step-by-step. "Going from a 3-centimeter to a whole-body system is too big a leap to do at once," Klink said. That's why only a few months ago, Philips designed a larger scanner with a 12-centimeter opening, likely for tests with imaging phantoms.

One hope is the technology will allow doctors to be able to toggle the optimization between sensitivity, speed and resolution, with doctors choosing to maximize two modes at the expense of the third, based on what sort of information they're looking for, Klink said.

According to Philips, current resolution is about 1.5 millimeters along one axis, and 3 millimeters along the others, but theoretically, the maximum resolution is below 1 millimeter. The fastest acquisition time is 0.02 seconds. By comparison, MRI acquisition is between 1 and 100 seconds, and PET is 800 seconds, Klink said.

For the preclinical model, the German business Bruker Biospin is working on building a system that combines MPI and MRI, either fully integrated in one hybrid unit or spaced apart as in Philips' recently developed PET-MRI unit.

But for humans, don't expect getting a stress test on one of these any time soon. Realistically, it's still five to 10 years away, even as a research tool in the clinic, Klink said.

"This is really a long-term research project," Klink said. "But our hope is, three years from now, we'll have proven MPI for whole body measurement."

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