 If each proton is a mini-magnet, & we have billions of protons in our

body i.e. billions of small magnets, so why our body does not act as a
big magnet?

This thing for once looks wrong but the fact that stands behind it that all these
billions of protons (mini-magnets) are aligned randomly in our body in which they
cancel out their magnetization.

 How could we make use of these small magnetizations in order to add

them & use their result in constructing the MR image?

We will know how after understanding the effect of an external magnetic field (B0)
on our body’s protons.
 What happens to the protons when we put them into an external
magnetic field?

To be able to answer this question we must know or understand how the proton
behaves in the absence of an external magnetic field.
~ Being free, protons spin & align themselves randomly as we see in the following
image.
* After when the protons are subjected to an external magnetic field they are re-aligned
with the external magnetic field in two ways:
1. Parallel to the magnetic field (upward).
2. Anti-parallel with the magnetic field (downward).
* But it is easier for a proton to align parallel or upwardly as if a person is standing on
his feet, unlike downwardly like someone walking on his hands. For about 10 million
protons “walking on their hands”, there are about 10 000 007 protons
“walking on their feet”.
* The second thing that happens to the protons is that they start to move in a
new way called “precession”, in which they rotate around their axis & at
the same time they undergo a circular motion at the top of their axis.
* In MRI it is important for us to know how fast the proton precesses. This
speed can be measured as precession frequency or the larmor
frequency or Resonance frequency which stands for the number
of precessions the proton does per one second.
* The precession frequency is not constant. It depends on the strength of the
magnetic field. The stronger the field, the faster the precession rate & the
higher the precession frequency.
* This frequency can be described by the following equation which is called
the larmor equation:
 is the larmor frequency (in Hz or MHz)
 is the gyro-magnetic ratio, which is a constant number for each
chemical element & is measured by MHz/Tesla (for hydrogen it is 42.5
MHz/T).

B0 is the external magnetic field (in Tesla).