Introduction to Principles of MRI#

This is a short book and associated simulation code for learning the principles of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It is based on the LarsonLab/MRI-education-resources repository, a set of helper functions I built up in the course of about a decade of teaching MRI to 1st year graduate students coming from a broad range of educational backgrounds (primarily natural sciences and engineering).

This book will be undergoing updates during the Fall Quarter 2023 as it has a more prominent role in my course.

Learning Goals#

Upon completing this book, the following Learning Goals should be achieved

  1. Describe the 4 fundmanetal components of a MRI scan and why they are necessary

  2. Understand what MRI is measuring

  3. Describe the concepts of polarization, resonance, and relaxation

  4. Describe how various types of MRI contrast are created

  5. Describe how images are formed

  6. Understand the most popular pulse sequences and their acronyms

  7. Understand the constraints and tradeoffs in MRI

  8. Manipulate MRI sequence parameters to improve performance

  9. Identify artifacts and how to mitigate them

  10. Manipulate and analyze MRI data

Getting Started#

This book jumps pretty quickly into concepts, for a quick overview of MRI, here’s my attempt to explain MRI in under 10 minutes:

How MRI Works (Explained In under 10 minutes)

Principles of MRI Course Lectures#

You can also access a full playlist of my lectures

Principles of MRI Recorded Lectures

Using MRI-Education-Resources code#

If you would like to use the associated code that goes along with this book, it is available at the git repository LarsonLab/MRI-education-resources, and also the GitHub icon above. I recommend cloning the repository via the GitHub Desktop application, this way you get all the code at once and then can pull any updates made to the repository.

Acknowledgements#

This book is greatly influenced by many other great resources that I want to acknowledge up front:

  • Principles of Magnetic Resonance Imaging by Dwight Nishimura - I learned from this great text and borrowed a lot of its material. For some of my students with less engineering/signal processing background, this book on its own was challenging.

  • Net magnetizations animation from Bill Overall and the SpinBench simulation and pulse sequence design tool

  • Miki Lustig’s MRI course notes

  • Educational resources from the Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance, which includes a great on-line Bloch Simulator