Evaluation of coils for imaging histological slides: signal-to-noise ratio and filling factor.

Purpose: To investigate the relative gain in sensitivity of five histology coils designed in-house to accommodate tissue sections of various sizes and compare with commercial mouse head coils.

Methods: The coil set was tailored to house tissue sections ranging from 5 to1000 µm encased in either glass slides or coverslips.

Results: Our simulations and experimental measurements demonstrated that although the sensitivity of this flat structure consistently underperforms relative to a birdcage head coil based on the gain expected from their respective filling factor ratios, our results demonstrate that it can still provide a remarkable gain in sensitivity.

Real-time gating system for mouse cardiovascular MR imaging.

Mouse cardiac MR gating using ECG is affected by the hostile MR environment. It requires appropriate signal processing and correct QRS detection, but gating software methods are currently limited. In this study we sought to demonstrate the feasibility of digital real-time automatically updated gating methods, based on optimizing a signal-processing technique for different mouse strains.