NMR characterisation of healthy rat tissues in vivo

This study using healthy rats has shown that the prospects for quantitative tissue characterisation using NMR parameters are very encouraging. Imaging allowed the relaxation rates of six rat tissues to be obtained in vivo. On the same imaging system and using identical experimental conditions the variation in T**1 (T1 evaluated assuming a monoexponential decay) of a tissue across up to 20 rats of the same age, sex and species was less than 7%. When individuals of different ages, sex and strain were used a similar small variation was observed. Further, we believe that any inherent biological variation in T**1 and T**2 values has not yet been detected in our studies.