Francisco M.
Martinez-Santiesteban1, Lanette Friesen Waldner2,
Timothy James Scholl1,2
1Department of
Medical Biophysics, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada; 2Imaging
Research Laboratories, Robarts Research Institute, University of Western
Ontario, London, ON, Canada
An important characteristic of hyperpolarized contrast agents is that they possess a suitably long T1 relaxation time to permit sufficient time for transportation, injection, metabolism and imaging. While T1 times can be readily measured at clinical field strengths, very little data, if any, exists at very low fields (< 10mT) where they are dispensed from the polarizing apparatus and transported to the fringe field of the MRI. The results presented here are some of the first T1 nuclear magnetic resonance dispersion measurements reported for hyperpolarized [1-13C] pyruvate.