A new fully digital and home-built NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) spectrometer working at very-low magnetic field (4.5 mT) is presented. This spectrometer was initially dedicated for the in situ measurement of the a...A new fully digital and home-built NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) spectrometer working at very-low magnetic field (4.5 mT) is presented. This spectrometer was initially dedicated for the in situ measurement of the absolute polarization of hyperpolarized 129Xe. It allows detection and acquisition of NMR signals of proton (1H) at 190 kHz and of hyperpolarized xenon-129 (HP 129Xe) at 50 kHz. In this new NMR instrument, we replaced as much analog electronics as possible by digital electronic and software. Except for the power amplifier and the preamplifier, the whole system is digital. The transmitter is based on the use of a Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS) board. The receiving board allows direct digitalization of the NMR signals thanks to an 8-bits analog-to-digital converter (ADC) clocked at 100 MHz. Decimation is preformed to dramatically improve the ADC resolution so as the final achieved effective resolution could be as high as 14-bits at 5 MHz sampling frequency. NMR signals are then digitally downconverted (DDC). Low-pass decimation filtering is applied on the base-band signals (I/Q) to enhance much more the dynamic range. The system requires little hardware. The transmitter and the receiver are controlled using Labview environment. It is a versatile, flexible and easy-to-replicate system. This was actually one of underlying ideas behind this development. Both 1H and hyperpolarized 129Xe NMR signals were successfully acquired. The system is used for the measurement of the absolute polarization of hyperpolarized 129Xe in hyperpolarizing experiments for the brain perfusion measurements. The high degree of flexibility of this new design allows its use for a large palette of other potential applications.展开更多
The design and performances of a high dynamic range DC-AC current sensor utilizing Giant Magneto-Impedance (GMI) are presented. The sensor is based on a GMI element with negative feedback. The sensing element is a 30 ...The design and performances of a high dynamic range DC-AC current sensor utilizing Giant Magneto-Impedance (GMI) are presented. The sensor is based on a GMI element with negative feedback. The sensing element is a 30 μm diameter GMI Co-based amorphous wire. It is curled to a toroidal core of 2 cm diameter. A bias magnetic field of about 650 A/m is applied to the GMI element to obtain an asymmetric GMI effect. A strong negative feedback is introduced to ensure linearity in a wide dynamic range. Analog conditioning electronics was fully developed. This includes a square wave oscillator based on an inverter trigger;a peak detector and a high gain amplifier with zero adjust. The GMI element is driven at a 3 MHz frequency and 5 mA peak-to-peak current. The closed-loop operations are investigated and the performances of the sensor are presented. DC current measurements are performed. The sensor exhibits good sensitivity and very good linearity, free from hysteresis, in a wide dynamic range of ±40 A. The sensitivity is about 0.24 V/A and the linearity error is about 0.02% of the full scale (FS). The hysteresis error is smaller than the measurement accuracy. AC current measurements using the developed sensor have also been successfully achieved. The sensor bandwidth in closed-loop was about 1.7 kHz.展开更多
The design and development of a new dual-frequency RF probe-head are presented. This probe was initially dedicated for the MRI of both proton (1H) and hyperpolarized Xenon-129 (HP 129Xe) in the rat brain at 2.35 Tesla...The design and development of a new dual-frequency RF probe-head are presented. This probe was initially dedicated for the MRI of both proton (1H) and hyperpolarized Xenon-129 (HP 129Xe) in the rat brain at 2.35 Tesla. It consists of a double-tuned (100 MHz- 27.7 MHz) volume coil, which could be used for both transmitting and receiving, and of a receive-only single-tuned (27.7 MHz) coil. The double-tuned coil consists of two concentric birdcage resonators. The inner one is a low-pass design and it is tuned to 27.7 MHz, while the outer one, tuned to 100 MHz, is high-pass. The receive-only coil is a surface coil which is decoupled from the double-tuned volume coil by an active decoupling circuitry based on the use of PIN diodes. A home-built Transmit/Receive (T/R) driver ensures biasing of the PIN diodes in both volume and surface coils. The original concepts of the design are addressed, and practical details of realization are presented. One of the underlying ideas behind this work is to proceed well beyond the application to the MRI of HP 129Xe. Actually, this design could be easily adapted for a large palette of other MRI applications. Indeed, we tried to make the design versatile, simple and easy to replicate by other research groups, with a low-cost, minimum development time and accepted performances. The prototype was validated at 100 MHz and at 26.4 MHz (sodium-23 resonance frequency at 2.35 T). MRI experiments were performed using phantoms. In vivo 1H images and 23Na spectra of the rat brain are also presented.展开更多
文摘A new fully digital and home-built NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) spectrometer working at very-low magnetic field (4.5 mT) is presented. This spectrometer was initially dedicated for the in situ measurement of the absolute polarization of hyperpolarized 129Xe. It allows detection and acquisition of NMR signals of proton (1H) at 190 kHz and of hyperpolarized xenon-129 (HP 129Xe) at 50 kHz. In this new NMR instrument, we replaced as much analog electronics as possible by digital electronic and software. Except for the power amplifier and the preamplifier, the whole system is digital. The transmitter is based on the use of a Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS) board. The receiving board allows direct digitalization of the NMR signals thanks to an 8-bits analog-to-digital converter (ADC) clocked at 100 MHz. Decimation is preformed to dramatically improve the ADC resolution so as the final achieved effective resolution could be as high as 14-bits at 5 MHz sampling frequency. NMR signals are then digitally downconverted (DDC). Low-pass decimation filtering is applied on the base-band signals (I/Q) to enhance much more the dynamic range. The system requires little hardware. The transmitter and the receiver are controlled using Labview environment. It is a versatile, flexible and easy-to-replicate system. This was actually one of underlying ideas behind this development. Both 1H and hyperpolarized 129Xe NMR signals were successfully acquired. The system is used for the measurement of the absolute polarization of hyperpolarized 129Xe in hyperpolarizing experiments for the brain perfusion measurements. The high degree of flexibility of this new design allows its use for a large palette of other potential applications.
文摘The design and performances of a high dynamic range DC-AC current sensor utilizing Giant Magneto-Impedance (GMI) are presented. The sensor is based on a GMI element with negative feedback. The sensing element is a 30 μm diameter GMI Co-based amorphous wire. It is curled to a toroidal core of 2 cm diameter. A bias magnetic field of about 650 A/m is applied to the GMI element to obtain an asymmetric GMI effect. A strong negative feedback is introduced to ensure linearity in a wide dynamic range. Analog conditioning electronics was fully developed. This includes a square wave oscillator based on an inverter trigger;a peak detector and a high gain amplifier with zero adjust. The GMI element is driven at a 3 MHz frequency and 5 mA peak-to-peak current. The closed-loop operations are investigated and the performances of the sensor are presented. DC current measurements are performed. The sensor exhibits good sensitivity and very good linearity, free from hysteresis, in a wide dynamic range of ±40 A. The sensitivity is about 0.24 V/A and the linearity error is about 0.02% of the full scale (FS). The hysteresis error is smaller than the measurement accuracy. AC current measurements using the developed sensor have also been successfully achieved. The sensor bandwidth in closed-loop was about 1.7 kHz.
文摘The design and development of a new dual-frequency RF probe-head are presented. This probe was initially dedicated for the MRI of both proton (1H) and hyperpolarized Xenon-129 (HP 129Xe) in the rat brain at 2.35 Tesla. It consists of a double-tuned (100 MHz- 27.7 MHz) volume coil, which could be used for both transmitting and receiving, and of a receive-only single-tuned (27.7 MHz) coil. The double-tuned coil consists of two concentric birdcage resonators. The inner one is a low-pass design and it is tuned to 27.7 MHz, while the outer one, tuned to 100 MHz, is high-pass. The receive-only coil is a surface coil which is decoupled from the double-tuned volume coil by an active decoupling circuitry based on the use of PIN diodes. A home-built Transmit/Receive (T/R) driver ensures biasing of the PIN diodes in both volume and surface coils. The original concepts of the design are addressed, and practical details of realization are presented. One of the underlying ideas behind this work is to proceed well beyond the application to the MRI of HP 129Xe. Actually, this design could be easily adapted for a large palette of other MRI applications. Indeed, we tried to make the design versatile, simple and easy to replicate by other research groups, with a low-cost, minimum development time and accepted performances. The prototype was validated at 100 MHz and at 26.4 MHz (sodium-23 resonance frequency at 2.35 T). MRI experiments were performed using phantoms. In vivo 1H images and 23Na spectra of the rat brain are also presented.
