About
A scanner that stays with the patient.
SomniScan is an early-stage medical imaging company in Chicago. We are building a whole-body ultra-low-field MRI system into the hospital bed itself, so that imaging becomes something a care team can do routinely instead of something they have to arrange.
Why a bed
Every patient already has one.
Every attempt to make MRI more available has worked on the same variable: make the machine smaller, lighter, cheaper, easier to wheel down a hallway. That has produced real progress, and portable point-of-care MRI is now a clinical reality.
But a portable scanner is still a shared resource. It has to be requested, fetched, positioned, cleaned, and rotated between rooms, so it reaches one patient at a time and only when someone decides the scan is worth arranging. The bed is the opposite. It is already assigned to the patient for one hundred percent of their stay, already at the right height, already the right length, and already holding the body in a position that repeats.
Put an open-face magnet under the mattress and the imaging becomes passive. The array draws no power, has nothing to wheel in, and needs no one to set it up, so a scan costs time rather than logistics. That changes both how often a patient can be imaged and how many patients can be imaged at all. Instead of one cart serving a unit, every equipped bed is a scanner, including the beds holding the patients who are never sick enough to justify a trip to radiology and the ones too unstable to survive one.
The question stops being whether this scan is worth the trip. It becomes how often the team wants to look.
How we work
Hardware first, and honest about the hard part.
Retire the physics risk first
The riskiest subsystem is operating without a shielded room. We are attacking electromagnetic interference at the start of the program rather than deferring it until after a nice-looking prototype exists.
Design for the room as it is
A device that requires clinicians to change what they already do will not survive contact with a real unit. The system has to work around lines, pumps, alarms, and the way a bed is actually used at 3 a.m.
Team and advisors
A small core, with unusually deep advisors.
The company is founder-led out of Chicago, with a background in enterprise AI delivery and healthcare operations. The technical depth comes from our advisory bench.
Our advisors are senior MRI physicists and systems engineers drawn from commercial imaging and neurosurgical image-guidance programs, including the team behind one of the only head-only MRI scanners ever taken to market. Between them they have owned magnet and gradient design, RF and coil engineering, reconstruction, image quality, and the regulatory path for cleared imaging products.
We are actively hiring the founding hardware engineer who will own the magnet and RF chain. If that describes you, the shortest route in is the contact form.
Get in touch
We answer our own email.
Investors, clinicians, imaging physicists, and hospital innovation teams are all welcome to reach out directly. Tell us what you would need to see to believe this works.