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The Open-Source MPI Project

Welcome to 'The OpenMPI Project' administered by the Magnetic Resonance Physics and Instrumentation Group’s Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) team. Within this website are descriptions of many of the MPI systems developed by our team and accompanying discussion on the rationale for the design each project. The motivation for building an open-source platform is that we believe the most efficient way for the modality to develop is by freely sharing information and lowering the threshold for new investigators to enter the field by sharing imager designs. We have benefited from the support of other groups and hope this will aide other new (or established) labs. In the spirit of the project we encourage groups to reach out to the primary authors of this site with contributions, critiques, and any questions.

The projects which are listed (so far) are:

• Small-bore Imager

  The Small-Bore Imager project is a scanner designed around the primary purpose of pre-clinical functional neuroimaging as well as breast cancer margin detection. The system employs a "Field-Free Line (FFL)" encoding scheme and has a free bore diameter of 50 mm to fit a rat head.

• Magnetic Particle Spectroscopy

  The MPS system was designed as a cheap, convenient method of characterizing particles for general lab use and reconstruction of images. Though this project is currently under construction, it will be updated as designs are finished and more results are acquired.

• Magnet Winding Jig

  The Winding Jig was essential for the construction of the large shift coils of the small-bore imager as well as the shift coils for a human-scale imager which we are actively developing (see E Mason et al, IJMPI 2017 for a discussion on that design).

These pages are being continually updated as our designs evolve with the rapidly developing field and for the most part what is published is what is currently implemented. In certain cases, we present designs that we have not yet fully implemented as the information may still be useful to others. In these cases, we will be explicit about what hasn't been experimentally validated.

License Information

We employ two licenses for this project, one that covers software and another for hardware.

• Software is published under the GNU General Public License v3.0, a strong copyleft license that permits the use for personal and commercial ventures yet restricts said uses in that if they are redistributed, they must also be open-source with the same license. Please read the license here or reach out to any of the authors if you have questions.
• Hardware is similarly licensed with the CERN Open Hardware License v1.2. The permissions and restrictions are similar but written with hardware licensure as the focus.

These were chosen as they are very free with respect to academic and intellectual liberties they permit while limiting the use of our developed software and designs for projects which do not align with the goals of this initiative.