An Accessible and Flexible Spectrometer for Teaching and Research in MRI Based on the Analog Discovery

Despite the proliferation of commercial MRI scanners across much of the world, there are many approaches to constructing low-cost MRI systems being reported. These respond to many needs, from teaching to research accessibility to accessible clinical health care. Most require a fairly high level of expertise to develop the actual system or use relatively expensive hardware. Here we present a minimal, but very capable MRI scanner constructed from the widely used Digilent Analog Discovery II or III devices. Very few external components are required, all available at low-cost from Amazon or other vendors. All programming is done in python, no expertise in FPGA programming or other low-level languages is required. A variety of applications are demonstrated, illustrating the capability of this minimalist system. By using widely available and relatively inexpensive components, the proposed system should make research and education in MRI available to essentially anyone anywhere in the world.