Ana Maria Oros-Peusquens1, Miriam Rabea Kubach1, Maija Laurila1, N. Jon Shah1,2
1Institute of Neurosciences and Biophysics, Research Centre Juelich, Juelich, Germany; 2Faculty of Medicine, Department of Neurology, RWTH Aachen University, JARA, Aachen, Germany
Relaxation times in pure water and their field dependence is well predicted by the Blombergen-Purcell-Pound theory; this dependence for typical MRI fields is negligible. Proton relaxation times in tissue are different from those of pure water and have a pronounced field dependence possibly due to micro-structural ferritin content, for example. We report a 3-field study of T2/T2* in vivo performed with the aim of providing quantitative information about transverse relaxation in a field range of 1.5T-4T. Further, we discriminate between the linear and quadratic dependence of T2/T2* on field strength and investigate the correlation between the rate increase in regions with clear a linear dependence and their estimated iron content. The relevance of this methodology to brain iron content measurements in vivo is discussed.