The thickness of the membrane separating the alveolar volume from the capillary blood is difficult measure with the chemical shift saturation recovery (CSSR) hyperpolarized xenon-129 MRI technique. In this work, we used a 1D gas exchange simulation to investigate the concept of measuring the gas-phase depolarization induced by the application of long RF pulses of variable power to extract information about the thickness of this membrane. Our simulations predict that measuring the red blood cell-induced gas-phase depolarization enables an estimation of membrane thickness even when the temporal lag between the rise in dissolved-phase signals cannot be accurately determined.
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