Abstract #1332

Parra-Robles J, Dominguez Viqueira W, Ouriadov A, Lam W, Abdeen N, Santyr G

In this work the magnetic field strength dependence of the SNR for imaging of small animal lungs in vivo is experimentally verified for rat lung images and spectra obtained at 17 mT and 1.89 T using xenon gas and at 3T using helium. In order to estimate the field strength giving optimal SNR, the ratio of noise contributions between the coil and the sample is theoretically predicted and experimentally measured for a range of resonant frequencies and coil and sample sizes. This study validates the theoretical model in vivo for the field dependence of the SNR and indicates that high field strengths (frequencies) may be optimal for HNG lung imaging of small animals such as rats (80-100 MHz) and mice (100-130 MHz).