Gradient Coils for the OCRA Tabletop MRI System

Hello OCRA and Tabletop community, In this blog post I want to share our gradient coil design for the OCRA Tabletop MRI System. Gradients fields are necessary to encode spatial information to the spin signal. As the origin of the spin signal is the homogeneous magnetic field (B0) it is possible to variate this field…

Relax2.0, a graphical user interface for OCRA

Hello OCRA and Tabletop community, In this blog post, I will share the news about the first GitHub publication of my Relax2.0 graphical user interface (GUI) for OCRA. Relax2.0 is based on the original OCRA server for the Red Pitaya by Thomas Witzel and the PyQt GUI Relax by David Schote. Relax2.0 can be downloaded…

Testing the transmit and receive functionality of the OCRA Tabletop MRI System

Hello OCRA and Tabletop community, In this blog I will guide you on how to test the RF functionality of the OCRA Tabletop MRI System. We will test the functionality for receiving RF spin signals (RX) and transmiting RF pulses (TX). For the tests you need a pickup loop coil. The coil can be build…

Transmit-Receive Switch for the OCRA Tabletop MRI system

Hello OCRA and Tabletop Community, In this blog I will share my Transmit-Receive (TR) switch design for our OCRA Tabletop MRI system. As it’s a general design, it also can be used for small RF-power applications in other MRI systems. The TR-switch is used to connect the RF-coil (antenna) to the RF Power-Amplifier (RFPA) in…

The OCRA Project in Magdeburg, Germany

Hello OCRA Community! My name is Marcus Prier and I’m working at the Research Campus STIMULATE of the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg (Germany). I’m a physicist and specialized in MRI RF electronics development. A few years ago, I had a short-term scholar at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center in Boston supervised by Larry Wald in Boston where I…