Fast EPR Acquisition with Adaptive Heterogeneous Clocking (AHC)

Zhiyu Chen¹, David Johnson¹, George Caia¹, Ziqi Sun¹, Sergey Petryakov¹, Alexandre Samouilov¹, Jay Zweier¹

Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Imaging (EPRI) can provide insight into in vivo anatomic and functional imaging of free radicals and paramagnetic molecules and their role in disease in small animal models. However, there is a need to expedite the data acquisition and post-processing to enable new EPRI applications. While previous work has used a fixed-rate master clock to pace all A/D and D/A conversion activities of the data acquisition electronics, Adaptive Heterogeneous Clocking (AHC) significantly reduces communication between the host computer and gradient hardware by using different clocks to pace the A/D and D/A functions of our acquisition cards. Projections containing up to 4096 points can be acquired in as little as 10 20 ms using AHC. Nearly real-time acquisition can be performed for complex computer-generated gradient waveforms, which will enable a variety of new sampling patterns.