MR microscopy with human 3T MRI

The topic of MR microscopy is an old one. However, the IBS CNIR is uniquely positioned to put such a technique to good use, with numerous occasions to need multi-modality (optical and magnetic) imaging of ex vivo tissue samples from a variety of animals. In that regard, we have been looking into making an RF coil that is particularly suited to image thin flat objects, such as a brain slice mounted on a glass slide. Such a coil is known as "histology coil" and was developed originally by the Penn State group several years ago. Now students from Gachon University, working as undergraduate interns in the lab, made one such coil tuned at 123.25 MHz for use in our 3T MRI machine. The picture above shows a 40 um-think rat brain slice imaged at 3T with the special coil. It is impressive that although the imaging time was a good fraction of an hour, one can image such a thin slice in a human MRI scanner. Surely this will improve at 7T, 9.4T and higher which are all available in our building. This raises hope that we can soon produce research quality images of histology samples and push it for quantitative MR parameter mapping, and pursue other fun (crazy) research ideas.