Shawn Wagner1,
2, Denis Avdic1, Alexander Grunfeld3, Debiao Li1,
2
1Biomedical
Sciences, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, United States; 2Biomedical
Imaging Research Institute, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA,
United States; 3Life Sciences, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, United
States
spin nuclei like yttrium (89Y) and silicon (29Si) can have long T1 values. Recent literature has suggested that the T1 value in silicon particles is size dependent because the dominate relaxation is a result of spin diffusion from the surface to the core. In this work, we measured the T1 values of silicon nanoparticles of various sizes to verify whether the hypothesis is true. We found that small nanoparticles have longer than predicted relaxation times and would be suitable for development into molecular targeting agents which could be followed for several hours.