Small-animal MRI instrumentation

Blamire, AM

doi:10.1007/978-1-4939-0894-3_7

Small-animal MRI instrumentation

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Andrew Blamire ORCiD

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Abstract

© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York. All rights are reserved. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) emerged in the 1970s from the laboratories of physical scientists where the basic phenomenon of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) was being investigated, and has rapidly expanded to permeate most areas of biological and clinical research. MRI is undoubtedly the most versatile of all the non-invasive imaging modalities. The MRI signal originates from the nucleus of the hydrogen atom (the proton) and while the intrinsic contrast of the MR image reflects differences in proton density within the tissue, selection of appropriate signal preparation schemes allows image intensity to be linked to other important processes such as blood flow (e.g. bulk flow for angiography or micro flow for tissue perfusion), Brownian water motion (e.g. diffusion imaging to assess tissue microstructure), tissue oxygenation (for functional information), etc. Further, the local chemical environment of the nucleus modulates the MR signal frequency allowing the identification of molecular groups using the allied technique of MR spectroscopy (MRS) allowing metabolic measurements. No other imaging modality can rival this inherent flexibility. For all of these MR measurement, the scanning instrumentation remains essentially constant, with selection of the contrast type determined by the specific imaging sequence alone. In this chapter we describe in detail the basic instrumentation required for small animal MRI.