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  1. Free, publicly-accessible full text available August 1, 2025
  2. Purpose

    An MRI scanner is equipped with global shim systems for shimming one region of interest (ROI) only. However, it often fails to reach state‐of‐the‐art when shimming two isolated regions of interest simultaneously, even though the two‐area shimming can be essential in scan scenarios, such as bilateral breasts or dyadic brains. To address these challenges, a hybrid active and passive local shimming technique is proposed to simultaneously shim two isolated region‐of‐interest areas within the whole FOV.

    Methods

    A local passive shimming system is constructed by optimized bilateral ferromagnetic chip arrays to compensate for the magnet's significant high‐order B0inhomogeneities at the boundary of the manufacturer's specified homogeneous volume, thus locally improving the available FOV. The local active shimming consists of 40‐channel DC loops powered by 64‐channel current amplifiers. With the optimized current distribution, active shimming can correct the residual low‐order B0inhomogeneities and subject‐specific field inhomogeneities. In addition, active shimming is used to homogenize the center frequencies of the two regions.

    Results

    With the implementation of the hybrid active and passive local shimming, the 95% peak‐to‐peak was reduced from 1.92 to 1.12 ppm by 41.7%, and RMS decreased from 0.473 to 0.255 ppm by 46.1% in a two‐phantom experiment. The volume ratio containing MR voxels within a 0.5‐ppm frequency span increased from 64.3% to 81.3% by 26.3%.

    Conclusion

    The proposed hybrid active and passive local shimming technique uses both passive and active local shimming, and it can efficiently shim two areas simultaneously, which is an unmet need for a commercial MRI scanner.

     
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  3. Abstract

    The rheology of lavas and magmas exerts a strong control on the dynamics and hazards posed by volcanic eruptions. Magmas and lavas are complex mixtures of silicate melt, suspended crystals, and gas bubbles. To improve the understanding of the dynamics and effective rheology of magmas and lavas, we performed dam‐break flow experiments using suspensions of silicone oil, sesame seeds, and N2O bubbles. Experiments were run inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to provide imaging of the flow interior. We varied the volume fraction of sesame seeds between 0 and 0.48, and of bubbles between 0 and 0.21. MRI phase‐contrast velocimetry was used to measure liquid velocity. We fit an effective viscosity to the velocity data by approximating the stress using lubrication theory and the imaged shape of the free surface. In experiments with both particles and bubbles (three‐phase suspensions), we observed shear banding in which particle‐poor regions deform with a lower effective viscosity and dominate flow propagation speed. Our observations demonstrate the importance of considering variations in phase distributions within magmatic fluids and their implications on the dynamics of volcanic eruptions.

     
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