# Introduction to Principles of MRI

This is a book and associated simulations for learning the principles of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).  It is based on about a decade of teaching MRI to 1st year graduate students coming from a broad range of educational backgrounds (primarily natural sciences and engineering).

## Learning Goals

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

1. Describe the 4 fundamental components of a MRI scan and why they are necessary
1. Understand what MRI is measuring
1. Describe the concepts of polarization, resonance, excitation, and relaxation
1. Describe how various types of MRI contrast are created
1. Describe how images are formed
1. Understand the most popular pulse sequences and their acronyms
1. Understand the constraints and tradeoffs in MRI
1. Manipulate MRI sequence parameters to improve performance
1. Identify artifacts and how to mitigate them
1. 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)](https://youtu.be/1Ku6-uXw7Ag)

## Principles of MRI Course Lectures

You can also access a full playlist of my lectures

[Principles of MRI Recorded Lectures](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjBt5Iq93BT9eXMsgevVTXKVv4BgVLB1X)

## Using MRI-Education-Resources code

There is a set of some associated code that goes along with this book, it is available at the git repository https://github.com/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](https://vista.ai/products/research-spinbench/) simulation and pulse sequence design tool
* Miki Lustig's MRI course notes
* Educational resources from the [Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance](https://www.drcmr.dk/MR), which includes a great on-line [Bloch Simulator](http://drcmr.dk/BlochSimulator/)