From Esaote S.p.A.; Esaote introduced the S-SCAN at RSNA in November 2007. The S-SCAN is a dedicated joint and spine MR scanner derived from the company's earlier G-SCAN system. Unlike the G-SCAN, neither the patient table nor the magnet can rotate from horizontal to vertical position. The patient table can only moved manually. Improved electronics, new coils for lumbar and cervical spine, new pulse sequences, a modified version of the magnet poles and gradient coils are used with a new software release in the S-SCAN.
Esaote North America is the exclusive U.S. distributor of this MRI device.

A saddle coil has a cylindrical body, with one or more turns of wire (older versions) or foil (newer versions) on each side. It generates a very homogenous field in the direction of its long axis. To achieve a higher B₁ homogeneity there are different developments like Folded Litz-foil Saddle Coils or Etched Litz-foil Saddle Coils.

See also the related poll result: '3rd party coils are better than the original manufacturer coils'

A plane, slice or section of the body cutting from front to back through the sagittal suture of the skull, and continued down through the body in the same direction, dividing it into two parts.

Quick Overview

Artifacts either by distorting the k-space trajectory (i.e. due to imperfect shimming) or as a consequence of the reduced bandwidth in the phase encode direction, commonly with EPI sequences.
While a standard spin warp-based sequence has an infinitely large bandwidth in the phase encode direction (about 1 or 2 kH), the bandwidth in EPI is related to the time between the gradient echoes (about a millisecond).
Hence even small frequency offsets can result in significant shifts of the signal in the phase encoding direction. Segmentation can introduce ghosting if there are significant difference in the amplitude and phase of the signal. This can be a particular problem when trying to acquire the segments in rapid succession.

Suitable choices of excitation schemes and/or subsequent correction can help to reduce this artifact. The signal from fat can easily be offset by a large fraction of the FOV, and must be suppressed. The effect of frequency offsets can be reduced by collecting data with more than one excitation, which effectively increases the bandwidth in the phase encoding direction.

Conversion of the analog signal to a series of digital values by measurement at a set of particular times; this utilizes the analog to digital converter. If the rate of sampling is less than twice the highest frequency in the signal, aliasing will occur. The duration of sampling determines how small a difference of frequencies can be separated.

See also Aliasing.