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PURPOSE: (i) To optimize an MR-compatible organ perfusion setup for the nondestructive investigation of isolated rat hearts by placing the radiofrequency (RF) coil inside the perfusion chamber; (ii) to characterize the benefit of this system for diffusion tensor imaging and proton ((1) H-) MR spectroscopy. METHODS: Coil quality assessment was conducted both on the bench, and in the magnet. The benefit of the new RF-coil was quantified by measuring signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), accuracy, and precision of diffusion tensor imaging/error in metabolite amplitude estimation, and compared to an RF-coil placed externally to the perfusion chamber. RESULTS: The new design provided a 59% gain in signal-to-noise ratio on a fixed rat heart compared to using an external resonator, which found reflection in an improvement of living heart data quality, compared to previous external resonator studies. This resulted in 14-29% improvement in accuracy and precision of diffusion tensor imaging. The Cramer-Rao lower bounds for metabolite amplitude estimations were up to 5-fold smaller. CONCLUSION: Optimization of MR-compatible perfusion equipment advances the study of rat hearts with improved signal-to-noise ratio performance, and thus improved accuracy/precision.

Original publication

DOI

10.1002/mrm.25369

Type

Journal article

Journal

Magn Reson Med

Publication Date

06/2015

Volume

73

Pages

2398 - 2405

Keywords

Langendorff perfusion, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, diffusion tensor imaging, proton spectroscopy, radiofrequency coil, Animals, Equipment Design, Heart, Image Enhancement, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Rats, Rats, Sprague-Dawley, Signal-To-Noise Ratio