An advanced phantom study assessing the feasibility of neuronal current imaging by ultra-low-field NMR

In ultra-low-field (ULF) NMR/MRI, a common scheme is to magnetize the sample by a polarizing field of up to hundreds of mT, after which the NMR signal, precessing in a field on the order of several μT, is detected with superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs). In our ULF-NMR system, we polarize with up to 50mT and deploy a single-stage DC-SQUID current sensor with an integrated input coil which is connected to a wire-wound Nb gradiometer. We developed this system (white noise 0.50fT/√Hz) for assessing the feasibility of imaging neuronal currents by detecting their effect on the ULF-NMR signal. Magnetoencephalography investigations of evoked brain activity showed neuronal dipole moments below 50nAm. With our instrumentation, we have studied two different approaches for neuronal current imaging. In the so-called DC effect, long-lived neuronal activity shifts the Larmor frequency of the surrounding protons. An alternative strategy is to exploit fast neuronal activity as a tipping pulse. This so-called AC effect requires the proton Larmor frequency to match the frequency of the neuronal activity, which ranges from near-DC to ∼kHz. We emulated neuronal activity by means of a single dipolar source in a physical phantom, consisting of a hollow sphere filled with an aqueous solution of CuSO4 and NaCl. In these phantom studies, with physiologically relevant dipole depths, we determined resolution limits for our set-up for the AC and the DC effect of ∼10μAm and ∼50nAm, respectively. Hence, the DC effect appears to be detectable in vivo by current ULF-NMR technology.