The Pulsar Home Page

Introduction Pulsar is a FREE tool for the generation and simulation of advanced RF pulses used nowadays in magnetic resonance imaging. You can take a look at its user interface here. Its key features are:

• Generation of adiabatic, one and two dimensional pulses
• Modular design that allows free combination of excitation profiles and k-space trajectories
• Import and export filters for RF pulses in Bruker format
• It is written in C/C++ which means that it is fast and can easily be modified to your own needs

License Pulsar is published under the terms of the GNU general public license

Platforms Pulsar was successfully tested on Debian GNU/Linux and IRIX6.3 but it should compile on any other UNIX computer where the Qt libraries are available.

Installation If you're familiar with installing software on UNIX from source code archives the installation won't be difficult as it uses the generic GNU autoconfig and automake tools. If you're not, please read the INSTALL file in the package carefully.

• Linux: Get the latest package(s) containig the Qt libraries AND headers. Unpack the archive (tar -xzf pulsar-x.x.tar.gz) and follow the instructions in the INSTALL file
• IRIX 6.3: Get the latest source code for the Qt libraries and compile them. Then unpack the archive (gunzip pulsar-x.x.tar.gz && tar -xf pulsar-x.x.tar). I noticed some problems compiling Pulsar on IRIX6.3 so I had to modify the configure script. I wrote a wrapper shell script that does this modification automatically and invokes configure. This script called 'sgiconfigure' can be downloaded here.

Documentation Sorry, but there's no exhaustive documentation for Pulsar except the [What's this?] button (the one labeled with the pointer and question mark) and, of course, the source code itself.

Changes See the ChangeLog for details.

Feedback If you have any questions, annotations, bug-reports please send a message to pulsar@jochimsen-sh.de.

Development If you want to participate in the the development: I assume you have basic knowledge of C/C++ and UNIX. Please take a look at the source code first. You should do this using the wonderful FREE development enviroment KDevelop (as I did) to get a quick overview and generic support for coding. If you have added new USEFUL features to Pulsar please send me an email and you'll get a big virtual hug together with your modifications surely being part of the next release.

Enjoy it!

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