Fetal magnetocardiography (fMCG) is an innovative and emerging diagnostic utility aimed at the early identification of fetal heart problems. Its efficacy for diagnosis and management of serious fetal arrhythmia has been acknowledged in the recent American Heart Association Statement on Diagnosis and Treatment of Fetal Cardiac Disease. In 2016, an experimental fetal MCG system with a… Read more »
Genetesis is developing CardioFlux – a clinical grade Magnetocardiography system powered by QuSpin QZFM sensors. The CardioFlux magnetic shield system is a cylindrical open end design (seen below) capable of attenuating background magnetic noise sufficiently to allow the CardioFlux to be installed in just about any clinical environment. The image below shows initial data recordings… Read more »
We report the latest results from a Wellcome Trust-funded collaborative project between the University of Nottingham and the University College of London investigating OPM based multichannel MEG to be presented at the Workshop on Optically Pumped Magnetometers (WOPM ‘17). Elena Boto and coworkers at Nottingham report, “We have shown the ability to beamform sources to… Read more »
In an important step towards building a full-head MEG system with OPMs, researchers at University of Nottingham and University College of London published results on their studies with a single OPM channel. A custom 3D printed MEG helmet was fabricated with slots to hold OPM at various locations. MEG evoked response was measured from 13 different… Read more »
Young Kim and Igor Savukov at Los Alamos National Labs demonstrate a new room temperature magnetic microscope. They used QZFM as the sensor element and a ferrite flux guide to transport magnetic field from a tiny test object to the sensor. In their experimental work, the authors used a 0.75 mm coil as the test… Read more »
Hari Eswaran and coworkers at the University of Arkansas published results from a head-on comparison between fetal Magnetocardiography recordings made with a SQUID system (CTF, 151 sensor SARA) and an OPM system (QuSpin, 2 sensors). The authors conclude: “Our preliminary results indicate that OPMs are potentially capable of replacing SQUIDs for fMCG systems. With further studies, we… Read more »
The picture above shows one our very early OPM prototypes (made back in Dec. 2012) which helped convince ourselves (and NIH) the feasibility of building practical, non-cryogenic sensors to potentially replace the SQUIDs. The prototypes were fragile and needed fiber-coupled external high power lasers and complex laboratory electronics, but the performance was very good even in the… Read more »