Developing a multichannel temperature probe for interventional MRI

Interventional MRI (I-MRI) guided thermal tissue ablation has been used for a variety of interventional cancer therapies. These would be further facil itated by temperature-sensitive sequences on low magnetic held MR images. H owever, until these sequences have been reliably implemented at low fields, other methods of temperature measurement are required, This project descri bes the development of a low cost, reliable, MRI-compatible temperature sen sor array useful at a temperature range from 37 degrees C to higher than 90 degrees C. The device uses a three-channel thermocouple sensor array conne cted to a variety of filtering and signal-conditioning electronics, analog- to-digital (A/D) converters, and personal computers. The sensors induce neg ligible field distortion, Similarly, no MRI-based measurement artifacts are observed. One-dimensional temperature profiles are generated with thermoco uple signal linearization performed by the software.