The movement of a nerve in a magnetic field: application to MRI Lorentz effect imaging

Direct detection of neural activity with MRI would be a breakthrough innovation in brain imaging. A Lorentz force method has been proposed to image nerve activity using MRI; a force between the action currents and the static MRI magnetic field causes the nerve to move. In the presence of a magnetic field gradient, this will cause the spins to precess at a different frequency, affecting the MRI signal. Previous mathematical modeling suggests that this effect is too small to explain the experimental data, but that model was limited because the action currents were assumed to be independent of position along the nerve and because the magnetic field was assumed to be perpendicular to the nerve. In this paper, we calculate the nerve displacement analytically without these two assumptions. Using realistic parameter values, the nerve motion is <5 nm, which induced a phase shift in the MRI signal of <0.02°. Therefore, our results suggest that Lorentz force imaging is beyond the capabilities of current technology.