It's a serious technical challenge but the benefits could be enormous.
IIRC the vast majority of the cost of an MRI is the amortized cost of the imager, so faster scans should hopefully directly reduce the cost to patients, perhaps to the point that regular full-body MRI scans for preventative healthcare could be feasible.
This is an interesting problem. Speaking with a number of physicians among the family, there's a perspective that having a population performing all these tests can possibly cause more problems than they solve. If the goal is to holistically make a person healthy and happy, discovering diagnoses that have no practical effects on someone's well-being can result in reducing their well-being just by knowing about it. Humans are notoriously bad this way. Tell someone their liver is somewhat different from an average adult liver and they'll start assigning symptoms to it.
I'm more thinking, wow you could really do a lot in the way of automated diagnoses if you had longitudinal data sets like that.
This is certainly false for clinical MR imaging in Canada. The biggest component is the cost of interpreting the scan, i.e. the radiologist's time.
"regular full-body MRI scans for preventative healthcare could be feasible."
What's the point? What are you looking for? What is the false positive rate on that? Screening for the sake of screening is a mirage[0].
[0] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-skeptical-look-at-screeni...