Preliminary in vitro studies of nuclear magnetic resonance spin-lattice relaxation times and three-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance imaging in gynecologic oncology

Principles of NMR spectroscopy and NMR imaging Many atomic nuclei behave like small magnets and are oriented by a magnetic field. For protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, only two orientations, marked Parallel and Antiparallel in Fig. 1, are permitted by the laws of quantum mechanics. More of the nuclei will be in the more stable (or lower energy) parallel state than in the antiparallel state, so that for a large number of nuclei there will be a net magnetization ( M) parallel to the field B 0 , as ~hown in Fig. 2. The transverse components cancel one another be-