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Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Techniques in Medicine

1983; American College of Physicians; Volume: 98; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.7326/0003-4819-98-4-514

1539-3704

E. Morton Bradbury,

Medical Imaging Techniques and Applications

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques are now finding exciting new noninvasive applications in medicine. There are two major approaches. The first is as an analytical technique using 31P NMR spectroscopy for the identification and quantitation of the more abundant phosphate metabolites in various tissues. Changes in the levels of these metabolites and in intracellular cytoplasmic pH can be followed in various ischemic and hypoxic conditions to monitor metabolic response to stress situations and to diagnose inborn errors of metabolism. The second major approach is an entirely different application of NMR techniques and uses 1H, the nucleus most abundant in biological tissues, largely in water and fats, to produce NMR images of any section of the body. By applying non-uniform magnetic fields across a section of the body, hydrogen nuclei in different elemental volumes in the section are tagged with different frequencies and their signals can be processed to give an image of the section. In contrast to computed tomographic scanning, NMR has particularly powerful application in the imaging of soft tissues.