Diffusion Pore Imaging by Hyperpolarized Xenon-129 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel NMR diffusion imaging technique using hyperpolarized xenon-129 that captures phase information, enabling direct visualization of pore and cell shapes in biological tissues and porous media.

Contribution

It introduces an experimental method to image arbitrary pore shapes with NMR diffusion, overcoming previous phase information limitations.

Findings

Successful imaging of arbitrary pore shapes using hyperpolarized xenon-129.

Elimination of signal loss issues at high resolution.

Potential for non-invasive structural analysis of tissues and porous materials.

Abstract

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) diffusion measurements are widely used to derive parameters indirectly related to the microstructure of biological tissues and porous media. However, a direct imaging of cell or pore shapes and sizes would be of high interest. For a long time, determining pore shapes by NMR diffusion acquisitions seemed impossible, because the necessary phase information could not be preserved. Here we demonstrate experimentally using the measurement technique which we have recently proposed theoretically that the shape of arbitrary closed pores can be imaged by diffusion acquisitions, which yield the phase information. For this purpose, we use hyperpolarized xenon gas in well-defined geometries. The signal can be collected from the whole sample which mainly eliminates the problem of vanishing signal at increasing resolution of conventional NMR imaging. This could be used to non-invasively gain structural information inaccessible so far such as pore or cell shapes, cell density or axon integrity.