SQUID-Based Microtesla MRI for In Vivo Relaxometry of the Human Brain

SQUID-based MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) at microtesla fields has developed significantly over the past few years. Here we describe application of this method for magnetic relaxation measurements in the living human brain. We report values of the longitudinal relaxation time T1 for brain tissues, measured in vivo for the first time at microtesla fields. The experiments were performed at 46 muT field using a seven-channel SQUID system designed for microtesla MRI and MEG. Values of T1, measured for different tissues at this field, are found to be close (within 5%) to the corresponding values of the transverse relaxation time T2 at the same field. Implications of this result for imaging contrast in microtesla MRI are discussed.

• Publication year

  2008

• Venue

  IEEE transactions on applied superconductivity

• Publication date

  2008-11-03

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Physics, Engineering

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1109/TASC.2009.2018764arXiv 0811.0389
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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