On-site construction of a point-of-care low-field MRI system in Africa

Purpose: To describe the construction and testing of a portable point-of-care low-field MRI system on site in Africa. Methods: All of the components to assemble a 50 mT Halbach magnet-based system, together with the necessary tools, were air-freighted from the Netherlands to Uganda. The construction steps included individual magnet sorting,...

An integrated target field framework for point-of-care halbach array low-field MRI system design

Objective: Low-cost low-field point-of-care MRI systems are used in many different applications. System design has correspondingly different requirements in terms of imaging field-of-view, spatial resolution and magnetic field strength. In this work an iterative framework has been created to design a cylindrical Halbach-based magnet along...

Deflated preconditioned Conjugate Gradient methods for noise filtering of low-field MR images

We study efficient implicit methods to denoise low-field MR images using a nonlinear diffusion operator as a regularizer. This problem can be formulated as solving a nonlinear reaction–diffusion equation. After discretization, a lagged-diffusion approach is used which requires a linear system solve in every nonlinear iteration. The choice of...

Low-field magnetic resonance imaging using multiplicative regularization

In this paper we present a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that is based on multiplicative regularization. Instead of adding a regularizing objective function to a data fidelity term, we multiply by such a regularizing function. By following this approach, no regularization parameter needs to be determined for each new data set...

Design, Characterisation and Performance of an Improved Portable and Sustainable Low-Field MRI System

Low-field permanent magnet-based MRI systems are finding increasing use in portable, sustainable and point-of-care applications. In order to maximize performance while minimizing cost many components of such a system should ideally be designed specifically for low frequency operation. In this paper we describe recent developments in...

Inversion of incomplete spectral data using support information with an application to magnetic resonance imaging

In this paper we discuss an imaging method when the object has known support and its spatial Fourier transform is only known on a certain k-space undersampled pattern. The simple conjugate gradient least squares algorithm applied to the corresponding truncated Fourier transform equation produces reconstructions that are basically of a similar...

In vivo 3D brain and extremity MRI at 50 mT using a permanent magnet Halbach array

Purpose: To design a low-cost, portable permanent magnet-based MRI system capable of obtaining in vivo MR images within a reasonable scan time. Methods: A discretized Halbach permanent magnet array with a clear bore diameter of 27 cm was designed for operation at 50 mT. Custom-built gradient coils, RF coil, gradient amplifiers, and RF...

Adaptive-size dictionary learning using information theoretic criteria for image reconstruction from undersampled k-space data in low field magnetic resonance imaging

Background: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a safe non-invasive and nonionizing medical imaging modality that is used to visualize the structure of human anatomy. Conventional (high-field) MRI scanners are very expensive to purchase, operate and maintain, which limit their use in many developing countries. This study is part of a project...

Conjugate gradient variants for ℓ _p -regularized image reconstruction in low-field MRI

We consider the MRI physics in a low-field MRI scanner, in which permanent magnets are used to generate a magnetic field in the millitesla range. A model describing the relationship between measured signal and image is derived, resulting in an ill-posed inverse problem. In order to solve it, a regularization penalty is added to the least...