Customer Reviews

NMR Probeheads: For Biophysical and Biomedical Experiments

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This book might be useful as an introduction to the subject of NMR Probeheads for junior-level electrical engineering students (as a supplement to Hoult's book), but it is not likely to be the first choice for many researchers. The professional, published literature is much better, even if it's rather scattered and thus much more expensive (if copyright laws are respected).

The biggest problem with this book is that it is extremely wordy, and it repeats too many simple and obvious observations. Of course, the simple observations, consequences, and solutions are appropriate in the early sections, but they quickly become tiring. It could easily be half as long - perhaps even shorter. Secondly, while the title leads the reader to believe that the scope might be fairly comprehensive, it is actually extremely limited. There is virtually nothing on high resolution liquids or solids probes, and there is nothing of substance on phased arrays, high field coils for large samples, full-wave 3D EM simulations, or linear circuit simulations. The subject of suppressing cable modes is poorly treated, as is the all-important subject of S/N optimization - the E field is basically ignored throughout the book. Thirdly, the treatments of the various coils all spend far too much time on theoretical approximations of the tuning and matching problems under idealized conditions and too little time on the practical details that often make the theoretical approximations of limited value.

If the book is used by its authors (and perhaps some other professors) in the classroom over the next few years, it is certainly conceivable that a second edition could evolve that would be useful to more researchers. Much better introductions to the subject of NMR Probes, by FD Doty, have just appeared on-line in the Encyclopedia of MR, Wiley, 2007. Very useful and current lists of references may be found there. http://mrw.interscience.wiley.com/emrw/9780470034590/home/

-F. David Doty, PhD

The is a very good book for those wanting to learn how to use and make NMR/MRI probeheads. It assumes a minimum knowledge of electronics and provide numerous illustrations. Since it is directed specifically towards NMR applications, it is immediately applicable. A CD is included with additional programs, but for Windows, Linus and Unix only. I've not yet tried to see what is applicable for OSX.

I'm very satisfied with this book and expect to constantly refer to it in the near future.