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Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a noninvasive neuroimaging technique in which the magnetic fields of electrically active neuron populations in the brain are measured outside the head. Recently, optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) have become suitable for practical measurements of the magnetic fields of the brain. In this presentation, I will give a short introduction to MEG and to OPMs and I will explain the benefits of using OPMs for MEG. I will present recent MEG measurements using OPMs and will introduce some of our current research areas such as development of a pulsed vector OPM and analysis of OPM signal equation revealing non-idealities in the OPM response. Last, I will shortly introduce an open-source Python software package called bfieldtools for magnetic field modeling that we developed at Aalto University. The main application of bfieldtools is design of electromagnetic coils with complex windings using the stream-function method.

Biography:

Joonas Iivanainen is a postdoctoral appointee at Sandia National Laboratories. He received his PhD from Aalto University (Helsinki, Finland) in 2020 with a thesis titled "On-scalp magnetoencephalography: Theory, implementation and measurements". Later in 2020, he joined Sandia National Laboratories to work on the development a wearable full-head magnetoencephalography system based on optically pumped magnetometers. His research focuses on optically pumped magnetometers and their use in magnetoencephalography.