Recipient organisationGold Standard Phantoms Limited
Funding£1.4M
PeriodMay 2023 — Dec 2025
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
A small plastic device called CARE™, placed inside an MRI scanner during a prostate scan, lets radiologists measure tissue properties with the same precision across different hospitals on different days. MRI scanners drift over time and vary between machines, so the same lesion can look different depending on where and when a patient is scanned. Radiologists currently lack a reliable way to calibrate their equipment for each scan—standard phantoms are too impractical for routine use. Without calibration, quantitative MRI metrics remain unreliable, and no universal thresholds exist to define what counts as a cancerous lesion. This forces radiologists to rely on subjective visual interpretation, which limits early detection. If CARE™ works as intended, it will turn MRI into a truly quantitative tool. Radiologists could compare measurements across institutions, establish standard thresholds for prostate cancer lesions, and deploy AI-based computer-aided detection—already routine in X-ray and CT—for the first time in MRI. The result would be faster, more consistent diagnosis, fewer missed early-stage cancers, and a stronger evidence base for clinical guidelines. The project is a direct engineering solution to a measurement problem, not fundamental science, but its impact on diagnostic infrastructure could be immediate.
View original technical description
Gold Standard Phantoms Limited, a University College London spinout, has conceived a ground-breaking solution to elevate the accuracy of cancer diagnosis through Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The revolutionary calibration tool, CARE™, has been developed to bolster radiologists' confidence in interpreting MRI measurements, especially in detecting early signs of lesion transformation in prostate cancer patients. The CARE™ solution lies at the heart of the PREDICT project, a forward-thinking initiative that targets the enhancement of prostate cancer diagnosis. With its unique calibration capability, CARE™ provides a significant advantage over the use of phantoms for calibration of MRI scanners, generally impractical and therefore often underused. Its ease of implementation in everyday patient scans will revolutionise prostate cancer diagnosis through the implementation of true quantitative MRI metrics. One of the standout benefits of CARE™ is the potential for cross-institutional measurement comparison. This capability opens the path to the creation of new guidelines, including specific thresholds for defining cancerous lesions – an achievement currently thwarted by the lack of MRI scanner calibration. The establishment of such guidelines is of profound interest to radiologists, as it would further solidify their critical role in diagnostics. In addition, CARE™'s calibration system enables the use of Computer-Aided Detection (CAD)-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) in MRI for the first time, a strategy presently employed in other quantitative imaging methods like X-ray and CT scans. This innovation promises significant productivity and efficiency gains for radiologists.
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