To ensure MR compatibility, the CLU enclosure was constructed from acetal and lined with 40 m copper shielding to prevent RF interference while minimizing eddy-current induced vibrations. The copper shield also serves as a heat spreader to ensure adequate surface area for conduction through the acetal enclosure. Images are transferred out of the scanner room using a fiber optic IEEE 1394b connection, rather than via copper cable, to improve MR compatibility. The CLU is powered using a single DC supply via coaxial cable, grounded to the Faraday cage of the scanner room. Charge pumps are used in the CLU to provide the required voltages. On-axis marker illumination is achieved through a half-silvered mirror, built into the CLU enclosure. The optics were designed so that the system can track a marker located anywhere between approx. 5 and 65 cm from the CLU. The optical components are mounted on a ceramic block, to ensure long term stability.
Since MPT tracking is independent of the MRI scanner, the tracking data must be transformed from the camera frame of reference into the scanner frame of reference. This is a trivial operation once the correct transformation matrix is known, but initially this is not the case. For the experiments described in this work, we applied the following method to compute the transformation. An MPT marker was fixed to a phantom and the phantom was imaged while tracking data from the camera were logged to file and averaged. This procedure was repeated 10-15 times, with small (e.g., 10°) rotations applied to the phantom between each scan. The difference between consecutive poses was computed using 3D image registration (for the MRI data) and straightforward quaternion operations (for the tracking data). The transformation between the two coordinate systems was then obtained using a least-squares optimization method, such that the measured pose difference data using the two methods became as consistent as possible (after transformation to the MRI coordinate system). In the 1.5 T and 3 T experiments, this transform was then optimized further by applying the procedure described in [3] (link). In this procedure, the phantom is rotated by 180° with prospective motion correction enabled between scans. The resulting phantom volumes are then approximately aligned, and any residual errors, as determined by image registration, are used to refine the transform. This procedure was not performed at 7 T, due to problems with performing the 180° rotations in long-bore scanner. This one-time calibration procedure per scanner generally takes 1–2 hours. No subject-specific calibration is necessary.