Home-built magnetic resonance imaging system (0.3 T) with a complete digital spectrometer

A home-built magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system with a complete digital spectrometer has been designed for investigation of plants and animals. With the application of the latest digital integrated circuit technology, the digital spectrometer is greatly simplified without the loss of flexibility and performance. A powerful pulse sequence compiler with a graphical editor can allow the user to edit the pulse sequence more easily and more conveniently than ever before. Moreover, a permanent magnet capable of producing a 180 mm diam spherical homogeneous region is employed in our MRI system to ensure a comparatively large image size. Compared with previous work, our MRI system has the features of flexibility, relatively large imaging size, and low cost. Experimental results obtained with the proposed system are presented in this article.