Prospective tissue-mimicking materials for use in NMR imaging phantoms

Water-based proteinaceous gels, which--with appropriate additives--are stable with time and possess a high melting point, have been used as base materials in ultrasonically tissue-mimicking materials. In the present work, versions of these gels having various concentrations of glycerol and graphite particles were studied regarding their NMR T1 and T2 dependencies at a proton Larmor frequency of 10.7 MHz. It has been found that T1 depends primarily on the concentration of glycerol and T2 depends primarily on the graphite particle concentration. Also, the ranges of T1 and T2 likely span those which exist for soft tissue parenchymae. Thus, these materials are good candidates for use as NMR tissue-mimicking materials. T1 and T2 also vary with gelatin concentration. The latter fact, together with the strong dependence of T2 on graphite concentration, mean that effective contrast-resolution phantoms and anthropomorphic phantoms with stable T1 and T2 distributions can be produced.