In Vivo Quantification of Renal Sodium Concentration with a Dual RF Resonator System

Raffi Kalayciyan¹, Friedrich Wetterling¹, Sabine Neudecker², Lothar R. Schad¹

The quantification of local Tissue Sodium Concentration (TSC) can serve as a diagnostic measure for renal diseases, because TSC is strongly linked to the corticomedullary function regulating the vascular ion concentrations. In this work, for the TSC quantification the required homogeneous B1 is achieved by a dual RF resonator system composed of a newly-developed low noise preamplifier receive-only coil without the need to tune and match, that was used in conjunction with a commercial transmit birdcage volume resonator. The TSC quantification in the rat kidney was illustrated through TSC maps using 3D-UTE sequence.