Correlative study of properties of water in biological systems using ultrasound and magnetic resonance

Ultrasonic and nuclear magnetic resonance properties of media rich in water are investigated. The chemical shift of the water proton in pure water, aqueous solutions of tertiary butanol, and sodium chloride is shown to be linearly correlated to the reciprocal of sound speed in these media. A new method of determining the self-diffusion coefficient of water by using acoustic nonlinearity and sound speed is proposed. The method is tested on a variety of media that include pure water, aqueous solutions of glycerol, serum albumin, egg constituents, plant tissues, frog muscle and liver, and excised human tissues. In all the cases the results are found to compare closely to diffusion coefficients measured by magnetic resonance. The results presented here indicate that the acoustic and magnetic resonance modalities, though inherently different in their origin, can provide closely related information on the properties of water.