Loud acoustic noise has been reluctantly accepted by the MR community as a necessary by-product of producing an image. It is often listed as a significant negative factor by patients, and is linked to high anxiety during a scan. But MR scans do not have to be noisy – if steep gradient changes can be avoided then only minimal acoustic noise is generated.
In this talk I will describe how serendipity provided the almost silent 3D radial Zero Echo-Time sequence, discuss the technical difficulties in producing high-quality, high-contrast images using it, and showcase recent work from our group in both structural and functional silent scanning.
Discussion points of the webinar:
What technical challenges does silent imaging have? How can we overcome them and achieve good image quality & contrast?
Why is acoustic noise a problem for clinical MRI?
How can we make MRI silent?
by Dr Tobias Wood
King’s College London
I have spent my career bouncing around the electromagnetic spectrum. During my Master’s project at the University of Cambridge I attempted to build a photonic network switch, and I then spent a year in the space industry working with telecommunications satellites in the GHz range. I then completed a PhD at Imperial College London in laparoscopic fluorescence imaging of cancer, before switching to a frequency of 300 MHz, developing quantitative MR methods on a pre-clinical 7T magnet at King’s College London. In recent years I have moved downfield slightly to 128 MHz, continuing with my interest in quantitative methods but also working to enable clinically useful silent MR scanning.