Phosphorus-31 MRI of hard and soft solids using quadratic echo line-narrowing.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of solids is rarely attempted. One of the main reasons is that the broader MR linewidths, compared to the narrow resonance of the hydrogen ((1)H) in free water, limit both the attainable spatial resolution and the signal-to-noise ratio. Basic physics research, stimulated by the quest to build a quantum computer, gave rise to a unique MR pulse sequence that offers a solution to this long-standing problem. The "quadratic echo" significantly narrows the broad MR spectrum of solids. Applying field gradients in sync with this line-narrowing sequence offers a fresh approach to carry out MRI of hard and soft solids with high spatial resolution and with a wide range of potential uses. Here we demonstrate that this method can be used to carry out three-dimensional MRI of the phosphorus ((31)P) in ex vivo bone and soft tissue samples.

Accelerating multidimensional NMR and MRI experiments using iterated maps.

Techniques that accelerate data acquisition without sacrificing the advantages of fast Fourier transform (FFT) reconstruction could benefit a wide variety of magnetic resonance experiments. Here we discuss an approach for reconstructing multidimensional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra and MR images from sparsely-sampled time domain data, by way of iterated maps. This method exploits the computational speed of the FFT algorithm and is done in a deterministic way, by reformulating any a priori knowledge or constraints into projections, and then iterating. In this paper we explain the motivation behind this approach, the formulation of the specific projections, the benefits of using a 'QUasi-Even Sampling, plus jiTter' (QUEST) sampling schedule, and various methods for handling noise. Applying the iterated maps method to real 2D NMR and 3D MRI of solids data, we show that it is flexible and robust enough to handle large data sets with significant noise and artifacts.