High Temperature Superconducting Biomagnetometers

Biomagnetometry using Superconducting QUantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) has great potential valoninvasively monitoring the heart, brain, nervous system and muscles. The widespread use of SQUIDs hby the cost and complexity of cooling to liquid helium temperatures. This problem has been eliminateof sensitve SQUIDs based on high-temperature superconductors (HTS) enabling operation at liquid nitrA key remaining problem is the difficulty of fabricating HTS pickup coils for the magnetic gradientto reject background noise. The Three-SQUID Gradiometer (TSG) eliminates this problem by using a magsystem in place of gradient pickup coils. Combining the TSG with HTS SQUIDS, all the fundamental ingplace for a practical biomagnetic sensor technology for monitoring electrical functions of the bodydevelop a new class of biomagnetometers based on the TSG. In Phase I, we will establish that an HTSfundamental performance characteristics --dynamic range, linearity, noise tolerance, and precision imeasurements -- needed to measure biomagnetic signals of order one picotesla in the presence or backto one microtesla. We will then identify specific sensor configurations and post-processing algorithbiomagnetic signals amid the inhomogeneous background fields found in real clinical environments. Duwill develop a full-scale instrument and demonstrate its utility in a particularly promising applicamagnetocardiography (FMCG). This program exploits the HTS capability afforded by Quantum Magnetics'alliance with IBM in superconducting sensor technology, together with our expertise as a leading devmanufacturer of SQUID instrumentation. National Center for Human Genome Research (NCHGR)