Active compensation in combination with weak passive shielding for magnetocardiographic measurements

We studied different schemes of noise reduction using active compensation of environmental magnetic field noises in order to develop a high-temperature-superconductor (HTS) magnetometer system for the measurement of magnetocardiographic signals. The active compensation was combined with weak passive shielding of about 20 dB by the use of a magnetically shielded room (MSR) having a single layer of surrounding μ-metal. A novel method using a normal detection coil and compensation coils that were wound around the walls of the MSR to enable magnetic coupling was examined. Effective suppression of environmental field noises of more than 20 dB at 0.5–10 Hz and 10 dB at 10–100 Hz, covering the low-frequency range of biological signals, was obtained. In an alternative method using a reference HTS magnetometer in the MSR for noise detection, a compensation coil was set in the MSR and served as a feedback coil in operating the magnetometer. Residual field noises that were limited by the intrinsic noise of the reference magnetometer were obtained. Using such active compensation and weak passive shielding, measurement of magnetocardiogram was possible with a sensing HTS magnetometer in a wide frequency range of 0.5–100 Hz.