Magnetic Resonance Imaging Applied to Biomedical Porous Media

Magnetic Resonance Imaging has been used to study the ingress of water into porous materials, as found in oil reservoir. These magnetic resonance methods to generate images of porous media can be used in biomedical applications, since some biological tissues are comprised of multiple small, fluid‐filled compartments, such as cells. Biliary and renal calculi show this kind of porous structure. We applied standard spin‐echo sequences to produce images of a spherical model which mimics renal calculi. A dual‐frequency coil previously developed by our group was used to generate images on a 4.7T Bruker animal imager. Phantom images were acquired and showed a relatively poor signal‐to‐noise ratio. These encouraging results motivate a further investigation into the application of other imaging sequences such a diffusion‐weighted and oscillating gradient‐echo sequences. This work should be performed with clinical magnetic resonance imagers if a clinical application is sought.