Spin-Scenario: A flexible scripting environment for realistic MR simulations

Yan Chang; Daxiu Wei; Huihui Jia; Cecilia Curreli; Zhenzhou Wu; Mao Sheng; Steffen J Glaser; Xiaodong Yang

doi:10.1016/j.jmr.2019.01.016

Spin-Scenario: A flexible scripting environment for realistic MR simulations

J Magn Reson. 2019 Apr:301:1-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jmr.2019.01.016. Epub 2019 Feb 13.

Authors

Yan Chang¹, Daxiu Wei², Huihui Jia³, Cecilia Curreli⁴, Zhenzhou Wu⁵, Mao Sheng³, Steffen J Glaser⁶, Xiaodong Yang⁷

Affiliations

¹ Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 215163 Suzhou, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China.
² Physics Department and Shanghai Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance, East China Normal University, 200062 Shanghai, China. Electronic address: dxwei@phy.ecnu.edu.cn.
³ Department of Radiology, Children's Hospital of Soochow University, 215025 Suzhou, Jiangsu, China.
⁴ Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 215163 Suzhou, China; Munich School of Engineering, Technical University of Munich, 85748 Garching, Germany.
⁵ Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 215163 Suzhou, China.
⁶ Department of Chemistry, Technical University of Munich, 85748 Garching, Germany. Electronic address: glaser@tum.de.
⁷ Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 215163 Suzhou, China. Electronic address: xiaodong.yang@sibet.ac.cn.

PMID: 30825713
DOI: 10.1016/j.jmr.2019.01.016

Abstract

In this paper we present a new open source package, Spin-Scenario, aimed at developing an intuitive, flexible and unique scripting framework able to cover many aspects of simulations in both MR imaging and MR spectroscopy. For this purpose, we adopted the Liouville space model as the standard computing engine and let the consequent computational burden be afforded by parallel computing techniques. Benefitting from the powerful Lua scripting language, the pulse sequence programming syntax was specially designed to offer an extremely concise way of scripting. Moreover, the built-in dataflow graph based optimal control scheme enables an efficient optimization of shaped pulses or multiple cooperative pulses for real-life experiment evaluations. As the name states, the users are expected to be able to realize their creative ideas like a scenarist that creates a scenario script and looks at the spin actors acting accordingly. The validation of the framework was demonstrated with several examples within MR imaging and MR spectroscopy. Spin-Scenario is available for download at https://github.com/spin-scenario.

Keywords: Optimal control; Pulse sequence programming; Spin dynamics; TensorFlow; Time-frequency spectrogram.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't