Magnetics Business & Technology - July/August 2020 - 13

FEATURE ARTICLE
tometer. In 2018, the company reached a
milestone of having shipped more than 500
of its QZFM magnetometers.
For more info, see www.quspin.com and
www.nottingham.ac.uk

MEG array in operation based upon QuSpin sensors. The system
uses Gen-2 QZFM mounted on the scalp using a flexible cap, to
measure the magnetic fields generated by current
flow through neuronal assemblies. In this way it offers
direct and non-invasive inference on human brain
electrophysiology.
The system is housed within a dedicated magnetically
shielded room built by Magnetic Shields Ltd which reduces environmental magnetic interference and limits
static field. Background fields are further controlled
by a set of bi-planar coils also now available commercially from MSL, said the centre. This precise field
control, coupled with the lightweight scalp mounted
sensors and cap, uniquely enables MEG measurement even if a subject moves during the measurement.
The images at the top of this article show a first demonstration of the 50-channel device which employed
a visuo-motor task. The subject was shown a visual
stimulus comprising a pattern of drifting concentric
circles known as a circular grating. While the visual
stimulus was on the screen, the subject was asked
to move their finger for a hundred 7-second trials.
Following OPM-MEG data collection, the locations
and orientations of the sensors on the scalp were
measured using a newly developed optical scanning
technique. Accurate knowledge of OPM placement
allowed data modelling using a beamformer to determine precisely where in the brain any measurable
neuromagnetic effects originate.

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The image above shows the results. The left-hand
panel shows the locations of the OPMs on the scalp
as determined by optical scanning. The centre and
right panels show measured brain function in the
visual, and motor cortices respectively.
The experiments represent a significant step towards
the development of a whole head OPM-MEG device.
With increased flexibility to adapt to any head shape,
movement tolerance to enable novel experimental
paradigms, and extremely high-quality data, this offers a step change in neuroscientific experimentation,
said the researchers.

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Nerviano, Milan, Italy (HQ) +39 0331 589 785
Lake Orion, Michigan, USA +1 248 340 7040
Shanghai, CHINA +86 21 5401 9806
www.laboratorio.elettroﬁsico.com

Based in Louisville, Colorado, QuSpin was started in
2012 with research funding from the National Institutes of Health. Its multidisciplinary team of physicists and engineers have worked on development
projects with the US Navy for a tri-axial vector atomic
magnetometer and a low-cost scalar atomic magne-

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July/August 2020 * Magnetics Business & Technology

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Magnetics Business & Technology - July/August 2020

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