New Delhi: A team of Indian engineers has developed a portable magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine that could be mounted on a truck to provide on-site scans currently unavailable to millions of people across the country.

The new compact and lightweight machine developed by the engineers in Bangalore will make MRI scans three to four times faster than existing scanners, the Tata Trusts' Foundation for Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship which supported its development announced on Thursday.

While current state-of-the-art MRI scanners are bulky and expensive, the foundation said, the new machine can be mounted on a truck and taken to small towns and even villages across the country for real-time imaging of patients even at primary health centres.

It relies on novel and proprietary software developed by a team of engineers led by Arjun Arunachalam, an electrical engineer who gave up an industry job a decade ago to pursue his vision of a simpler MRI machine.

Arunachalam founded Voxelgrids, a start-up that received support from the Tata Trusts' FISE and the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum, and his colleagues have spent the past two years building the machine.

"Innovation and entrepreneurship requires creativity, hard work and endurance to succeed," Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Trusts, said in a media release. "I am pleased the MRI project team has demonstrated this."

Arunachalam said an ethics panel at the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences hospital where the machine was developed was expected to approve human studies with the scanner next month.