E.H. Hardy
New York, NY: Springer, 2011, 228 pages, $129
The discoveries of nuclear MR (NMR) by I. Rabi, F. Bloch, and E. Purcell during World War II and of MR imaging by P. Lauterbur and P. Mansfield in the 1970s were major advancements in science, engineering, and medicine. Many NMR and MR imaging methods based on these discoveries have resulted in great practical benefits to society, and these methods continue to improve and to expand into new applications. A clear understanding of the fundamental principles and of some of the hardware and software requirements for optimally realizing these methods and applications is helpful for nearly every medical practitioner, scientist, and engineer.
This book is a compilation and summary of NMR- and MR imaging–related research and teaching at the author’s institution, the Department of Chemical and Process Engineering of the Karlruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. The book is primarily intended for readers with an engineering background who are interested in applying or developing NMR or MR imaging methods for the study of structure and transport in mechanical, chemical, and food process engineering. However, the underlying principles and technical specifications of the methods are the same for medical applications such as anatomic, thermal, and blood flow imaging. Therefore, readers interested in clinical applications of these methods should also find the book relevant and useful.
The book comprises 9 chapters, but the main content of the book is contained in chapters 2 through 4. Chapter 2 provides a fairly concise overview of the fundamentals of NMR and MR imaging processes. In addition, several basic and useful quantitative image analysis tools such as segmentation and phase correction are presented. Chapter 3 describes the major experimental components of an NMR system, including the magnets, gradient coils, and radiofrequency probes. Special emphasis is placed on the design of the actively shielded gradients and impedance matching of the RF probes. Chapter 4 describes some rather specific theoretic or experimental aspects of 10 distinct NMR- or MR imaging–related applications in various process engineering fields (e.g., gas filtration, solid–liquid separation, rheometry, structure of a ceramic sponge, flow and growth in a biofilm reactor, temperature mapping during microwave heating, and droplet size distribution in emulsions).
Wherever appropriate, the author has presented detailed mathematic equations and their derivations for better understanding of the quantitative aspects of the topics under discussion. A few sets of problems and solutions are provided in Chapter 5, and the Matlab source codes for actual implementation of a few image processing algorithms are provided in Chapter 6. Readers (especially students or postdocs) who are keen to “get their hands dirty” should find this material helpful in testing and developing algorithms of their own for related problems.
Footnotes
Published online Feb. 22, 2013.
- © 2013 by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, Inc.