Why MRI Barely Uses High-Temperature Superconductors
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the largest commercial use of superconductors anywhere in the world. Every hospital scanner is built around a superconducting magnet, and there are tens of thousands of them. Almost none of that market belongs to high-temperature superconductors (HTS), the tape this site follows. It belongs to niobium-titanium, an older material known as a low-temperature superconductor (LTS), which has to be held a few degrees above absolute zero in liquid helium.
That distinction matters when sizing the HTS opportunity. MRI is huge, and it is not an HTS market. This article explains why, and where in medical imaging HTS does sell.
MRI runs on the older material, in large volumes
A National Academies review of superconducting wire states that world production of niobium-titanium wire is measured in hundreds of tons a year, and that MRI production drives that number. By comparison, the entire HTS tape industry is about 15 manufacturers producing over 5,000 km of tape a year, nearly all of it already committed to fusion magnets, cables and research projects, as our applications page sets out.
These magnets are big pieces of equipment. France’s Iseult scanner, the most powerful whole-body MRI built, is a 132 tonne niobium-titanium magnet cooled by a helium bath at 1.8 K. So MRI is a large, steady, commercially funded market for superconducting wire.
Helium was supposed to be the way in for HTS
A conventional scanner magnet runs at 4.2 K and holds 1,500 to 2,000 litres of liquid helium, and the magnet and its cooling system come to roughly 38% of what the whole scanner costs. Helium is expensive, non-renewable and prone to shortages. The Radiological Society of North America reports that hospitals are the largest end users of helium, at 32% of the global market in 2021.
HTS materials work at higher temperatures, so an HTS magnet would not need liquid helium. That has been the argument for HTS in MRI for fifteen years.
The incumbents closed that opening without HTS
The argument lost. Philips’ BlueSeal magnet seals just 7 litres of helium inside for the life of the machine and never needs topping up. Philips reports more than 2,000 systems installed and over 6 million litres of helium saved, and in November 2025 extended the design to more powerful 3.0 tesla machines. Siemens has a rival magnet using 0.7 litres. Both are built from niobium-titanium, not HTS.
However, niobium-titanium becomes less stable when it is cooled without a helium bath, so these magnets run at a lower current and need more superconducting wire, not less. Taking the helium out of MRI increased demand for the older conductor.
The practical conclusion for anyone forecasting demand: helium shortages are not a route into hospital MRI for HTS tape.
The one HTS scanner on the market has not displaced anything
There is a single exception. ASG Superconductors sells the MROpen EVO, an open 0.5 tesla scanner wound from magnesium diboride, which one review identifies as the only commercially available HTS-based scanner. Magnesium diboride is cheap and contains no silver, which is why it has long been the favourite candidate for a helium-free scanner. ASG also builds cable from it, including a data centre project with Italy’s nuclear physics institute.
Its limitation is a good illustration of why this market is hard to enter. A normal MRI magnet holds its field on its own: once energised, the current circulates around a closed loop of wire and the power supply is switched off. That requires joints between wires with no measurable resistance, and making such joints in magnesium diboride remains a critical unsolved problem. The MROpen EVO therefore has to keep a power supply connected.
That is a manufacturing problem rather than a limit of physics, but it has been outstanding for twenty-five years.
HTS sells where the magnet has to be stronger than niobium-titanium allows
Where HTS has genuinely won commercial business is in stronger magnets, used for chemical analysis rather than patient scanning. Bruker’s top spectrometers combine HTS in the inner coils with the older material outside, reaching 28.2 tesla, and in April 2025 the company announced a 30.5 tesla system built around an HTS insert. For comparison, a typical hospital scanner is 1.5 or 3 tesla, and Iseult, a national research machine, is 11.7.
That is the pattern. HTS did not win those magnets by being cheaper or by removing helium. It won because niobium-titanium cannot reach those field strengths at all, so there was no existing product to displace. The buyers are research institutes purchasing one machine at a time, which is low volume at a high price per metre of tape.
The same could eventually apply to patient imaging. German researchers are working toward a 14 tesla whole-body scanner, a strength that would require different conductors, possibly HTS. As of a 2025 review of the field, no such HTS magnet exists anywhere.
What this means for the demand picture
Medical imaging belongs in any list of superconductor applications, because it is the largest one. It does not belong in a forecast of HTS tape demand. The realistic HTS business in this field is a small number of very strong magnets that cannot be built any other way, sold to research buyers, rather than the hospital scanner market that makes the headline number look large. The applications that do consume tape today are set out in where the tape goes.