Abstract
This study using healthy rats has shown that the prospects for quantitative tissue characterisation using NMR parameters are very encouraging. Imaging allowed the relaxation rates of six rat tissues to be obtained in vivo. On the same imaging system and using identical experimental conditions the variation in T1** (T1 evaluated assuming a monoexponential decay) of a tissue across up to 20 rats of the same age, sex and species was less than 7%. When individuals of different ages, sex and strain were used a similar small variation was observed. Further, the authors believe that any inherent biological variation in T1** and T2** values has not yet been detected in their studies.