Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a household name in healthcare, with an estimated 100-150 million Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans performed globally each year to diagnose everything from brain tumors to torn ligaments. Its power is undisputed, but its process has always been slow, complex, and expensive. At Orbem, we saw an opportunity to change that. We are on a mission to industrialize MRI, transforming it into a tool that is fast, automated, and accessible to everyone, starting with the food industry.

To achieve this, we had to completely rethink how MRI works. 

Taking poultry as an example, let’s look at how we adapt MRI for the purpose of sexing unhatched chicken eggs. The global poultry industry incubates approximately 100 billion eggs each year. If we used traditional medical MRI methods to look inside them, it would take us roughly 3.8 million years. A typical hospital MRI scan requires a patient to be manually positioned on a table, moved into the scanner, and then wait anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes for the scan to complete. Every step demands human interaction.

In our early days, we followed this manual process, scanning about one egg per minute. Today, our automated Genus Focus system scans an egg in less than one second. How did we achieve this leap in performance?

In close partnership with automation expert the Vencomatic Group, we built a fully automated system that eliminates the need for human interaction and seamlessly integrates in the hatchery process. This process has four key elements:

Automating MRI on this scale required solving complex challenges:

Flawless data tracking

Our system manages multiple asynchronous processes—like egg movement, scanning, and AI classification—and must perfectly match every classification result to the correct physical egg on the chain. Mistakes here are not an option.

MRI-Safe Design

The powerful magnetic fields in an MRI scanner required us to construct the entire egg chain from non-metallic materials, like specialized plastics and rubber, to ensure safety and prevent image interference. For the same reason, our magnet room is locked at all times, to anyone except for MRI engineers. Because we have developed a reliable industrial version of MRI, our magnet rooms never need access outside of the yearly preventative maintenance by a trained MRI engineer.

The Challenge of Speed vs. Quality

Finally, our system must meet the immense throughput demands of modern hatcheries, where thousands of eggs require analysis daily. In imaging, there is a fundamental trade-off: accelerating an MRI scan typically reduces image quality. However, in our process, we cannot compromise on accuracy. This is where our deep expertise shines. Our team of MRI and AI scientists implements state-of-the-art acquisition and reconstruction techniques that overcome this challenge, ensuring maximum throughput without any expense to accuracy.

We are constantly investigating new methods to push our processing speeds even further, redefining what is possible in industrial imaging.

By mastering the automation of MRI, Orbem is doing more than just looking inside eggs. We are building a platform with the potential to significantly reduce waste and improve quality across the entire food industry. Viewing MRI not just as a healthcare tool but as a powerful industrial solution allows us to process food at a scale that was previously impossible, paving the way for a more efficient and sustainable global food system.