A new piezo actuator drive for magnetic resonance imaging

Abstract

In this paper a new piezo actuated drive the PAD is introduced. The PAD exhibits a combination of working principle and characteristics that makes it ideally suitable for robotics and positioning tasks in an MRI. Experiments in a 1.5 Tesla MRI showed that there is a high distortion in the images with the PAD next to the slice, but the image quality is improving rapidly, with an increasing distance between the PAD and the image by some centimeters. Connecting the PAD to the power supply does not affect the distortion, but increases the noise in the image.