Marinus T. Vlaardingerbroek / Jacques A. den Boer

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Springer)

“Only a quarter of a century after the invention of MRI one may expect that in the developed countries there will be about one MRI system for every 10⁵ inhabitants.”

It may be common knowledge that similar pleasure centres in the brain light up when eating chocolate or having sex. But good ol’ MRI can tell us much more.

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The Spin Zoo

MR-Physics, Department of Medical Radiology, University Hospital of Basel

“Some people believe that spins are just a quantum mechanical property of nuclei. However, spins are very small but lovely animals. And they like magnetic fields. We have collected some spins that used to live in our MR scanner, and we put them into our spin zoo.”

See the Spin Zoo, and click on the .gif file links for animation of magnetisation vector evolutions.

Whilst learning MRI theory I occasionally came across statements which, whilst describing sources of error in MRI images, ended with

“…and other off-resonance effects.”

Scary. Ok, not scary, but I had no idea what that meant. It turned out, off-resonance effects are not a black art or higher plane of MR knowledge after all. So here’s a quick recap. What are off-resonance effects? Continue Reading »