Magnetic resonance imaging inside cylindrical metal containers with an eddy current self-compensated method

Abstract

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measurements inside cylindrical metal structures have recently been proposed and form the basis for new high-pressure MRI studies. The critical problem for MRI inside cylindrical metal structures is significant eddy currents induced by the switched magnetic field gradients, which usually corrupt spatial and motion encoding without appropriate correction. In this work a so-called standard SPRITE (single point ramped imaging with T1 enhancement) technique is applied for imaging inside cylindrical metal structures. We show that the standard SPRITE technique is fundamentally immune to large-scale eddy current effects and yields artifact-free high-quality images with no eddy current correction required. Standard SPRITE image acquisition avoids the complications involved in the measurement and compensation of eddy current effects for MRI with cylindrical metal structures. This work is a substantial advance toward the extension of MRI to new challenging systems, which are of practical importance.