ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the physical principles of Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and then the hardware of a basic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiment. Magnetic resonance imaging, commonly known as MRI, is a powerful non-invasive imaging technique that has played and will continue to play an important role in the medical community. MRI belongs to a larger group of techniques which are based on the phenomenon of NMR. This phenomenon was discovered in bulk materials by Bloch and Purcell in 1946. Modern quantum mechanics reveals that certain atomic nuclei possess a property known as spin. In order to understand the physical origin of relaxation, it is necessary to revise our heuristic model for the behavior of bulk magnetization in the presence of magnetic fields. In addition, desired gradients are typically linear, since the mathematics of most imaging schemes depends on this simple type of gradient.
