Finding common ground: Subject grounding to reduce electromagnetic interference at 46 mT

Motivation: Electromagnetic interference (EMI) reduction is essential to utilize low-field point-of-care MRI devices in different environments with different noise conditions. Goal(s): Improving EMI reduction by subject groundingApproach: Noise scans and brain images were acquired with and without subject grounding. This is done with normal imaging conditions and when adding broadband noise or single frequency EMI. Results: The SNR of the images was improved by a factor of ~4 when grounding the subject and adding broadband EMI to the experiment. A factor ~2 improvement in SNR was observed for the single frequency EMI and a factor of 1.5 improvement for the normal imaging conditions. Impact: Subject grounding effectively reduced EMI interference. It may be relevant to investigate whether this setup would be able to reduce EMI from medical equipment, or general environmental EM noise in typically challenging POC settings (ICU, emergency room, in remote locations)