Division of accelerators, cryogenics and magnetism

Neurological and psychiatric disorders are major concern for the economy and a society.  Although, many discoveries have been made in neuroscience in the last few years, the source of causes of these disorders remain unknown. This is mainly due to the lack of spatial-temporal resolution of current imaging techniques unable to deeply reveal the complexity of functional clustered neurons at the mesoscopic scale. One solution is to exploit the high inherent sensitivity and specificity of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) at ultra-high field MRI systems. However, the performance of the current gradient coil installed in modern MRI system limits the possibility to break the frontiers of the neuroscience in the understanding of degenerative brain diseases. Key to the solution is to develop a safe and high performance head gradient coil capable to produce 150 m/T/m at slew rate beyond the 2000 T/m/s to probe spatial-temporal events occurring in time frame smaller than 1 sec and at the same time register imaging at mesoscopic scale.

The main aim of the lecturer is to present different designing tools developed in the area of gradient/shims coils and LTS/HTS magnets and introduce recent works in the development of highly performance head gradient coils that safely breaks the frontier of current designs and thereby find common points of interest for a possible collaboration.