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School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science

Prof Richard Syms, Imperial College London

20 March 2013

Time: 3:00 - 4:00pm
Venue: BR 3.02 Bancroft Road Teaching Rooms Peter Landin Building London E1 4NS

Magneto-Inductive Waves and Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Magneto-Inductive Waves and Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Periodic structures have long been of interest in electrical engineering, and many different arrangements of reactive elements have been devised for signal transmission and filtering. Renewed interest in periodic electrical structures was sparked by the realisation they can act as artificial media with novel properties, such as negative permittivity, permeability or refractive index. Such has been the explosion of activity that ‘metamaterials’ is now an entire field. Although many applications concentrate on exploitation of negative parameters (for example, perfect imaging and cloaking), other important engineering applications exist. In this talk, applications of a particular kind of metamaterial are described. This material supports magneto-inductive waves, which may easily be excited by precessing nuclear spins in magnetic resonance imaging. Theoretical background and experimental results are presented for passive and amplified MI waveguides. Applications in MRI are described, especially for patient protection in internal imaging. The long-term goal is early detection of cholangiocarcinoma (cancer of the biliary ductal system, which is epidemic in the Far East).

Biography: Richard Syms is Professor of Microsystems Technology and Head of the Optical and Semiconductor Devices Group in the EEE Dept, Imperial College London. He has published widely on holography, guided wave optics, electromagnetics and microengineering, and has developed a wide range of microdevices, including miniature quadrupole mass spectrometers and RF probes for magnetic resonance imaging. In 2001, he co-founded the spin-out company Microsaic Systems, which manufactures the world’s only desktop electrospray mass spectrometer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Electrical Engineers.


This Seminar is hosted by Yang Hao

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