Diffusion-weighted imaging is widely used in the clinic to detect stroke lesions due to its high sensitivity to microstructural tissue changes.

The aim of this project is to develop a low field MR equipment (10mT) for stroke imaging. Our role is to develop diffusion pulse sequences accounting for the hardware limitations of the developed system, namely the low strength of the static field B0 and the characteristics of the gradient coils (maximum gradient amplitude and slew rate), as these will affect both the available magnetisation (which determines the baseline signal level) and the achievable level of diffusion-weighting (which determines the image contrast).