Developing a spectral parallelism electronic system for magnetic resonance imaging

Abstract

In this paper, we present a spectral parallelism electronic system that works as a data acquisition and image reconstruction system for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It uses a custom receiver chain and narrowband bandpass filters. The broadband magnetic resonance (MR) signal is spectrally separated into multiple narrowband channels. Then each channel signal is processed individually and the system recombines the frequency-limited narrowband signals from the separate channels to reconstruct images or signal profiles. The final image is reconstructed by recombining all the channels data via weighted addition, where the weights correspond to the frequency responses of each narrowband filter. Results were obtained using a clinical MRI system and the images acquired by the developed embedded system showed the feasibility of achieving images with signal-to-noise ratio comparable to those produced by the clinical system.