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Scientific result | MRI | Medical imaging | Physics

A new ceramic probe for magnetic resonance microscopy.


​The Fresnel Institute, in collaboration with the University of St Petersburg and a team from NeuroSpin, has developed a new ceramic resonator (probe) suitable for 17T magnetic resonance microscopy, i.e. for spatial resolutions below 100 μm3. This probe allows the production of MRI images with a signal-to-noise ratio 2 times greater than those obtained with reference probes, in copper.

Published on 23 May 2019

Abstract of the original paper

The spatial resolution and signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) attainable in magnetic resonance microscopy (MRM) are limited by intrinsic probe losses and probe–sample interactions. In this work, the possibility to exceed the SNR of a standard solenoid coil by more than a factor‐of‐two is demonstrated theoretically and experimentally. This improvement is achieved by exciting the first transverse electric mode of a low‐loss ceramic resonator instead of using the quasi‐static field of the metal‐wire solenoid coil. Based on theoretical considerations, a new probe for microscopy at 17 T is developed as a dielectric ring resonator made of ferroelectric/dielectric low‐loss composite ceramics precisely tunable via temperature control. Besides the twofold increase in SNR, compared with the solenoid probe, the proposed ceramic probe does not cause static‐field inhomogeneity and related image distortion.

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