Venkatesh Arvind K, Zhang Adelaide X, Mansour Joey, Kubatina Lyubov, Oh Chang Hyun, Blasche Gregory, Selim Unlü M, Balamore Dilip, Jolesz Ferenc A, Goldberg Bennett B, Albert Mitchell S
Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Magn Reson Imaging. 2003 Sep;21(7):773-6. doi: 10.1016/s0730-725x(03)00178-4.
In hyperpolarized (HP) noble-gas magnetic resonance imaging, large nuclear spin polarizations, about 100,000 times that ordinarily obtainable at thermal equilibrium, are created in 3He and 129Xe. The enhanced signal that results can be employed in high-resolution MRI studies of void spaces such as in the lungs. In HP gas MRI the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) depends only weakly on the static magnetic field (B(0)), making very low-field (VLF) MRI possible; indeed, it is possible to contemplate portable MRI using light-weight solenoids or permanent magnets. This article reports the first in vivo VLF MR images of the lungs in humans and in rats, obtained at a field of only 15 millitesla (150 Gauss).
