Evaluation Method of Magnetic Sensors Using the Calibrated Phantom for Magnetoencephalography

抄録

  In recent years, many kinds of magnetic sensors have been developed for biomagnetic measurement, such as magnetocardiography (MCG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). However, it is difficult to evaluate their performance using only actual MCG or MEG measurements. In this paper, we propose the use of the calibrated MEG phantom for quantitative evaluation of magnetic sensors and present the experimental method. We choose a magneto-impedance (MI) sensor as an example of the magnetic sensor to be evaluated. The magnetic field distribution near the phantom was measured using the MI sensor and a signal source was localized with different averaging numbers and different signal source intensities. The results suggest that the MEG signal cannot be observed in the usual averaging time (i.e., 100), even when the sensor is located near the head; 4.0 mm of source localization accuracy can be achieved with 400-times averaging if the sensor noise decreases to 1/10. The use of the calibrated phantom, instead of examination with human subjects, is effective for quantitative evaluation of the performance of magnetic sensors.