Why a magnetically-shielded room ?

Working with ultra-sensitive sensors is problematic though as these latter are very good at picking up all sorts of nuisances and electromagnetic perturbations generated by external sources. The magnetically-shielded room (MSR) has been an early major improvement to MEG sensing technology. All sites in urban areas contain the MEG equipment inside the walls of an MSR, which is built from a variety of metallic alloys. Most metals are successful at capturing radio-frequency perturbations. Mu-metal (a nickel-iron alloy) is one particular material of choice: its high magnetic permeability makes it very effective at screening external static or low-frequency magnetic fields. The attenuation of electromagnetic perturbations through the MSR walls is colossal and makes MEG recordings possible, even in noisy environments like hospitals (even near MRI suites) and in the vicinity of road traffic.

Scales of magnetic fields in a typical MEG environment (in femto- Tesla (fT), one fT is 10-15T), compared to equivalent distance measures (in meters) and relative sound pressure levels. A MEG instrument probe therefore deals with a range of environmental magnetic fields of about 10 to 12 orders of magnitude, most of which consist of nuisances and perturbations masking the brain activity.

The magnetically-shielded room (MSR) in the course of its installation at the MCW MEG program.

Copyright 2010 Sylvain Baillet, PhD