A novel digital magnetic resonance imaging spectrometer.

Spectrometer is the essential part of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system. It controls the transmitting and receiving of signals. Many commercial spectrometers are now available. However, they are usually costly and complex. In this paper, a new digital spectrometer based on PCI extensions for instrumentation (PXI) architecture is presented. Radio frequency (RF) pulse is generated with the method of digital synthesis and its frequency and phase are continuously tunable. MR signal acquired by receiver coils is processed by digital quadrature detection and filtered to get the k-space data, which avoid the spectral distortion due to amplitude and phase errors between two channels of traditional detection. Compared to the conventional design, the presented spectrometer is built with general PXI platform and boards. This design works in a digital manner with features of low cost, high performance and accuracy. The experiments demonstrate its efficiency.