Multi-flux-transformer MRI detection with an atomic magnetometer.

Recently, anatomical ultra-low field (ULF) MRI has been demonstrated with an atomic magnetometer (AM). A flux-transformer (FT) has been used for decoupling MRI fields and gradients to avoid their negative effects on AM performance. The field of view (FOV) was limited because of the need to compromise between the size of the FT input coil and MRI sensitivity per voxel. Multi-channel acquisition is a well-known solution to increase FOV without significantly reducing sensitivity. In this paper, we demonstrate twofold FOV increase with the use of three FT input coils. We also show that it is possible to use a single atomic magnetometer and single acquisition channel to acquire three independent MRI signals by applying a frequency-encoding gradient along the direction of the detection array span. The approach can be generalized to more channels and can be critical for imaging applications of non-cryogenic ULF MRI where FOV needs to be large, including head, hand, spine, and whole-body imaging.