Analysis of Gradient Waveform in Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Abstract

The accuracy of gradient pulse waveform affects image quality significantly in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Recording and analyzing the waveform of gradient pulse helps to make rapid and accurate diagnosis of spectrometer gradient hardware and/or pulse sequence. Using the virtual instrument software LabVIEW to control the high speed data acquisition card DAQ-2005, a multi-channel acquisition scheme was designed to collect the gradient outputs from a custom-made spectrometer. The collected waveforms were post-processed (i.e., histogram statistical analysis, data filtering and difference calculation) to obtain feature points containing time and amplitude information. Experiments were carried out to validate the method, which is an auxiliary test method for the development of spectrometer and pulses sequence.

Keywords

• MRI
• spectrometer
• gradient pulse waveform
• LabVIEW
• feature point extraction