A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, United States.
A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, United States; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States.
Neuroimage. 2018 Mar;168:71-87. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.06.013. Epub 2017 Jun 7.
Functional MRI (fMRI) at 7T and above provides improved Signal-to-Noise Ratio and Contrast-to-Noise Ratio compared to 3T acquisitions. In addition to the beneficial effects on spin polarization and magnetization of deoxyhemoglobin, the increased applied field also further magnetizes air and tissue. While the magnets themselves typically provide a static B field with sufficient spatial homogeneity, the diamagnetism of tissue and the paramagnetism of air causes local field deviations inside the human head. These spatially-varying field offsets (ΔB) cause image artifacts, especially in single shot EPI, including geometric distortion, signal dropout, and blurring. These effects are particularly strong near air-tissue interfaces such as the frontal sinus, and ear canals. Furthermore, if the field offsets are dynamically modulated through physiological processes such as respiration or motion, then the effect on the image time-series can be even more problematic. While post-processing methods have been developed to mitigate these effects, the ideal solution would be to reduce the ΔB variations at their source. Typically 7T scanners contain 2nd and some 3rd order spherical harmonic shim coil terms to cancel static ΔB variations of low spatial order. In this article, we will motivate the need for improved, higher-order compensation for B inhomogeneity and potentially add dynamic control of these fields. We discuss and compare several promising hardware approaches for static and dynamic B shimming using either higher-order spherical harmonic shim coils or multi-coil shim arrays as well as passive shimming approaches, and active variants such and adaptive current networks.
7T 及以上的功能磁共振成像(fMRI)与 3T 采集相比,提供了更高的信噪比和对比噪声比。除了对脱氧血红蛋白的自旋极化和磁化有有益影响外,增加的外加磁场还进一步磁化了空气和组织。虽然磁铁本身通常提供具有足够空间均匀性的静态 B 场,但组织的抗磁性和空气的顺磁性会导致人头内的局部磁场偏差。这些空间变化的磁场偏移(ΔB)会导致图像伪影,特别是在单次激发 EPI 中,包括几何变形、信号丢失和模糊。这些效应在鼻窦和耳道等空气-组织界面附近尤为强烈。此外,如果磁场偏移通过呼吸或运动等生理过程动态调制,则对图像时间序列的影响可能更加严重。虽然已经开发了后处理方法来减轻这些影响,但理想的解决方案是减少源头上的ΔB 变化。通常,7T 扫描仪包含二阶和一些三阶球谐匀场线圈项,以抵消低空间阶数的静态ΔB 变化。在本文中,我们将论证需要改进、更高阶的 B 不均匀性补偿,并可能增加这些场的动态控制。我们讨论并比较了几种有前途的硬件方法,用于使用更高阶球谐匀场线圈或多线圈匀场阵列以及无源匀场方法,以及自适应电流网络等主动变体进行静态和动态 B 匀场。