Home // BIOTECHNO 2022, The Fourteenth International Conference on Bioinformatics, Biocomputational Systems and Biotechnologies // View article

A New Phased Array Magnetic Resonance Imaging Coil for Hbo2 Studies

Authors:
Azma Mareyam
Erik Shank
Laurance Wald
Michael Qin
Giorgio Bonmassar

Keywords: hyperbaric oxygen therapy; MRI; safety; diving medicine.

Abstract:
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting blood flow changes as cerebral blood flow, and neuronal activation are coupled. fMRI is noninvasive, is considered safe, and may allow studying the brain under hyperbaric conditions. This new coil may be necessary for studying decompression sickness and disorders of hyperbaricity, including nitrogen narcosis. This study focuses on the safety and technical details of building fMRI coils for human hyperbaric studies. One of the most remarkable properties of this novel technology is that the new multichannel arrays provide high-quality images at 3 Tesla (T) MRI, one of the highest strength magnets among the most common MRI scanners available in the market. The paper describes all the risks associated with simultaneous MRI and Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBO2) and discusses mitigation strategies and regulatory testing. One of the most significant risks for this type of study is a fire in the hyperbaric chamber caused by the sparking of the MRI coils due to high voltage RF arcs. RF pulses at 128MHz elicit signals from the human tissues, and RF sparking occurs commonly and is considered safe in normobaric conditions. We describe how we built a coil for HBO2-MRI studies by modifying an eight-channel phased-array MRI coil with all the mitigation strategies discussed. The coil was fabricated and tested with a unique testing platform that simulated the worst-case RF field of a 3 Tesla MRI in a Hyperlite hyperbaric chamber at 3 atm pressure. The coil was also tested in normobaric conditions for image quality in a 3 T scanner in volunteers and SNR measurement in phantoms. Further studies are necessary to completely characterize the coil safety for HBOT/MRI studies by following the Guidance for Industry, and Food and Drug Administration titled "Testing and Labeling Medical Devices for Safety in the Magnetic Resonance (MR) Environment".

Pages: 17 to 19

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2022

Publication date: May 22, 2022

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4383

ISBN: 978-1-61208-971-3

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from May 22, 2022 to May 26, 2022