19F chemical shift imaging in perfluorocarbons.

The use of 19F chemical shift sensitive imaging techniques to monitor the biodistribution of perfluorocarbons (PFC) is discussed. For these experiments one has to study the spectroscopic properties of the PFC to be mapped for choosing high performance NMR imaging sequences. Three techniques used in our laboratory, a chemical shift selective approach, a method using spectrum simplification and a chemical shift sensitive NMR imaging method using adjusted phase encoding are discussed and illustrated by experiments.