MR imaging of oscillatory magnetic field changes: Progressing from phantom to human

Detection of ultra-weak oscillatory magnetic field changes using MRI is of great research interest not only for neuronal current MRI of endogenous neuronal oscillations but also for direct visualization of exogenous transcranial currents or iron oxide contrast agent distribution. In this work, we present a novel oscillatory-selective detection (OSD) method that is magnitude-sensitive to the oscillatory magnetic field changes and immune to the main field inhomogeneity. In OSD, a train of 180° pulses with alternating polarity and mirror symmetry are used to refocus and accumulate magnetization changes induced by external oscillatory fields. After taking both the signal change and image signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) into account, a final 90° pulse with a phase offset of 45° is applied to store a combination of the current-induced signal change and background magnetization for the subsequent EPI acquisition. Its performance was demonstrated in phantom and human studies, both of which showed much better detection in the comparison with the recently proposed spin-lock oscillatory excitation (SLOE) method. OSD was further successfully applied in imaging transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) induced field changes in the human brain. These promising results suggest that OSD can overcome the limitation of field inhomogeneity impeding previous oscillatory current MRI sensitivity and be a viable tool in future tACS study.