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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Med. Technol.
Sec. Diagnostic and Therapeutic Devices
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmedt.2025.1548260
This article is part of the Research Topic Magnetic Neurophysiology: The Cutting Edge of Real Time Neurodiagnostic Technology View all 5 articles
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Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a neuro-imaging technique that measures neuronal activity at a millisecond scale. A few years ago, a new generation of MEG sensor has emerged: optically pumped magnetometers (OPM). The most common OPM use alkali atoms as sensing element. These alkali OPM sensors must be heated to around 150 °C, in contrast to classical MEG sensors (SQUID MEG) which need to be cooled down to -269°C. This article focuses on a new kind of OPM, using Helium-4 gas as sensing element, which solves some disadvantages of alkali OPM. 4 He-OPM sensors operate at room temperature, with negligible heat dissipation (10 mW) and thus do not need thermal insulation. They also offer a large dynamic range (±200 nT) and frequency bandwidth (2000 Hz). The main goal of this study is to characterize the performance of a whole-head MEG system based on 4 He OPM sensors ( 4 He OPM MEG). We first simulated different sensors configurations with three different numbers of channels and three different head sizes, from child to adult, in order to assess the signalto-noise ratio and the source reconstruction accuracy. Experimental testing was also performed using a phantom for simulating brain magnetic activity. Simulation and experiments show equivalent detection capability and localization accuracy on both MEG systems. These results illustrate the benefit of 4 He OPM sensors that operate at room temperature and are positioned closer to the scalp.
Keywords: Simulation, OPM, MEG, Squid, Helium OPM, Neuroimaging
Received: 19 Dec 2024; Accepted: 28 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bonnet, Schwartz, Gutteling, Dalligault and Labyt. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Etienne Labyt, Mag4Health, Grenoble, France
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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