Ruud Bernardus van Heeswijk1, Fiodar Kurdzesau2,3, Cristina Cudalbu1, Arnaud Comment1,2, Jacques J. van der Klink2, Gil Navon4, Rolf Gruetter1,5
1Center for BioMedical Imaging (CIBM), Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, VD, Switzerland; 2Laboratory for Physics of Nanostructured Materials, Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, VD, Switzerland; 3Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen, Switzerland; 4School of Chemistry, Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel; 5Departments of Radiology, Universities of Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland
Lithium-6 has recently been demonstrated to have longitudinal decay times on the order of minutes and to be readily hyperpolarizable by dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP). It was also shown to be quite sensitive to the negatively charged contrast agent Gd-DOTP. The aim of this study was to demonstrate that these principles can be combined to quantitatively detect very low concentrations of contrast agent: the longer the relaxation time, the more sensitive it becomes to the contrast agent.