Kai Ruppert1, Talissa A. Altes1, Iulian C. Ruset2, G. Wilson Miller1, Jaime F. Mata1, Kun Qing1, Igor Tsentalovich3, F. William Hersman, 23, John P. Mugler III1
1University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States; 2Xemed LLC, Durham, NH, United States; 3University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States
The T2* of hyperpolarized xenon-129 dissolved in lung tissue is about 2 ms, which greatly reduces the resulting signal amplitude for most gradient-echo pulse sequences. In this work, we measured the T2 of dissolved-phase xenon using a global CPMG echo-train spectroscopic pulse sequence and identified a large (85%) signal component with a T2 of ~18 ms and a smaller (15%) component with a T2 of ~400 ms. The long T2 component would be suitable for direct imaging using a spin-echo sequence. However, due to its small amplitude, an improvement in image quality over existing gradient-echo pulse sequences remains doubtful.