Highly Integrated, Low Cost, Palm-Top Sized Magnetic Resonance Relaxometry System for Rapid Blood Screening

Abstract

A highly integrated, palm-top sized radiofrequency Magnetic Resonance Relaxometry System (19cm x 16cm x 5cm, weigh 250g) is developed. In this work, we show strategy on how to integrate all the modules into a single mother board which consists of coin-sized permanent magnet, miniaturized radio-frequency microcoil probe, compact lumped-circuit duplexer, and single board 4-Watt power amplifier, in which a FPGA-based spectrometer is used for pulse excitation, signal acquisition and data processing. We demonstrated that by measuring the proton transverse relaxation rates from a large pool of natural abundance proton-nuclei presence in less than 1 μL of red blood cells, one can indirectly deduce the relative magnetic susceptibility of the bulk cells within a few minutes of signal acquisition time.