Purpose: (i) To optimize an MR-compatible organ perfusion
setup for the nondestructive investigation of isolated rat hearts
by placing the radiofrequency (RF) coil inside the perfusion
chamber; (ii) to characterize the benefit of this system for diffusion
tensor imaging and proton (1
H-) MR spectroscopy.
Methods: Coil quality assessment was conducted both on the
bench, and in the magnet. The benefit of the new RF-coil was
quantified by measuring signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), accuracy,
and precision of diffusion tensor imaging/error in metabolite
amplitude estimation, and compared to an RF-coil placed
externally to the perfusion chamber.
Results: The new design provided a 59% gain in signal-to-noise
ratio on a fixed rat heart compared to using an external resonator,
which found reflection in an improvement of living heart data
quality, compared to previous external resonator studies. This
resulted in 14–29% improvement in accuracy and precision of
diffusion tensor imaging. The Cramer–Rao lower bounds for
metabolite amplitude estimations were up to 5-fold smaller.
Conclusion: Optimization of MR-compatible perfusion equipment
advances the study of rat hearts with improved signal-tonoise
ratio performance, and thus improved accuracy/precision