Pulse Sequence Programming using XML and JavaScript

Introduction: Pulse-sequence programming is typically performed in low-level compiled languages, principally C and C++. These languages are extremely flexible, but the complexity of the resulting code makes it hard to maintain. Creating new sequences is timeconsuming, and the resulting compiled code is often not portable across platforms. We propose the use of higher-level XML and interpreted scripting to simplify the sequence programming process, resulting in human-readable code that is portable across scanners and more easily maintained. This approach has analogy in web programming, where HTML files provide a lightweight format for describing web pages, and interpreted scripting languages (JavaScript, perl, etc.) are made available on top of that to enable more complex and dynamic content.