Abstract
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a fast growing medical imaging technique. Biomedical engineers will find more and more opportunities in this field. There is a growing demand of an effective teaching system for training engineering students to learn principle knowledge and have hands on experience for MRI. The objective of this research project is to cast a MRI teaching demonstration system in the laboratory environment and assist student to learn MRI through interactive simulations in the Internet accessible learning environment. The first part of the work is to customize the newly installed EFNMR (Earth Field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) system in the Bioimaging Lab to demonstrate nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) phenomenon, NMR relaxation and T1/T2 weighted contrast mechanisms under laboratory environment. This demo is performed in the Earth’s magnetic field with a low field coil probe. Procedures to acquire and optimize MRI signal, estimate/calculate T1 and T2 values are presented. Relaxation time T1/T2 weighted images are also presented. The second part is to build two graphical user interface (GUI) platforms to simulate the magnetic resonance imaging reconstruction process. Assuming an ideal noiseless condition is setup and the Magnetic Resonance signal intensity is proportional to the image pixel intensity. The GUI-based simulation provides students online demonstrations of combined resonance signal, K-space construction, and FFT used to decompose signal from frequency domain back to spatial domain in an interactive fashion.