Active EMI Suppression System for a 50 mT Unshielded Portable MRI Scanner

Objective:
Passive shielding is usually applied to block electro-magnetic interference (EMI) for portable very-low field MRI scanners, but it goes against the mobility of the scanners. Here, the reference channel-based active EMI suppression (AES) system was proposed to discard them.
Methods:
Different from the existing studies, this work started with analyzing the interference transmission paths and discovered that the human body coupling was the main path. Then, the “ring-” shaped EMI receiving coil designed here together with the electrocardiograph (ECG) electrode patch were used to suppress the human-body-coupled interferences. For the first time, the periphery data of the
k
-spaces of the RF coil and the EMI detectors were utilized to calculate the transfer factors in multiple frequency bands by using the least square method. The reference EMI signals were transferred to the interferences in the MR signal by multiplying the transfer factors in each frequency band, and the denoised MR signal could be obtained by subtracting the transferred reference EMI signals.
Results:
The prototype of the AES system was applied to a 50 mT unshielded portable MRI scanner. The in-vivo experiments indicated that the interference suppression rate of the AES system equipped with the “ring-” shaped EMI receiving coil could reach 96.8%. Meanwhile, the SNR of the images after interference suppression by the AES system equipped with both types of detectors was 97.2% of that of the images scanned inside the shielded room.
Conclusion:
The proposed AES system ensures that the portable MRI scanner works normally in unshielded environment.
Significance:
Our study provides a solution to make portable MRI scanners truly movable.