Hardware and software solutions for a versatile pulse programmer have been presented. The core of the pulse programmer is an FPGA device that provides flexibility to the design and reduces the number of electronics elements needed. The event of the pulse programmer consists of 16 bits. The main feature of the proposed pulse programmer is that the 16 outputs can be independently delayed. This is important for correcting delays of the RF channels or the gradient channels due to various causes. The proposed pulse programmer is integrated into an MRI scanner, and the correction of the gradient system delay is taken as an example to experimentally demonstrate its performance.

The results show that the phase coherence between the transmitter and the receiver and the dynamic range of the receiver are greatly improved. Consequently, the proposed digital receiver may be useful for obtaining multiple-slice two-dimensional magnetic resonance images with very high resolution.

The middle insula has been associated with incidental self-processing of negative information elicited by individual's handwriting. However, emotional valence and arousal have been proved to work in an interactive way and located in middle insula. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study used participant's handwritings as material to explore how incidental self-processing affected the interaction of valence and arousal and its neural basis. Each participant was asked to read silently emotional and neutral words written by himself/herself or the other person. The right middle insula as well as the left putamen showed greater activations in response to emotional stimuli evoking conflicting approach-withdrawal tendencies (i.e., positive high-arousal and negative low-arousal words) relative to stimuli evoking congruent approach versus withdrawal tendencies (i.e., positive low-arousal and negative high-arousal words), whereas a reverse activation pattern in these two regions was observed during processing other-handwriting. The current study indicated that incidental self-processing modulates the interaction of emotional valence and arousal.

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