2.1 Profiles with transverse relaxation times
Experiments were carried out in a single-sided NMR device PM25, from Magritek GmbH, which has a static gradient of 7 T/m and operates at a frequency of 12.99 MHz for 1H, with detection volume 26.7 mm away from the magnets, and a sensitive area of approximately (4 × 4) cm2. The sample is positioned over a flat holder and the magnet position is moved with a precision lift, in this way, control of the position of the selective slice is achieved. The system may be set to five different configurations setting the excitation/detection coil further from the magnet and closer to the sample, defining different penetration depths ranging from 5.4 to 25 mm. In this work, without loss of generality, we restrict our discussion to a penetration depth of 10.6 mm. The length of the radiofrequency (RF) pulses was of \({t}_{RF}=\)9.5 µs. The excited bandwidth for this configuration defines a maximum slice thickness of 350 µm [25, 31]. Due to the large static gradient, the magnetization is rapidly dephased after a 90° excitation pulse, in a time shorter than the typical receiver dead times, therefore the free induction decay (FID) cannot be acquired. This leads to the use of multipulse refocusing sequences that capture the evolution of multiple echoes. For liquids, a Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG)[33, 34] pulse sequence is generally used to detect the magnetization evolution.
For the acquisition of proton densities as a function of the sample height, namely a profile, the addition of several echoes is used to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). However, if the sample consists of different proton pools with varying transverse relaxation times, the acquisition of the whole echo train will provide information on the different proton pools as a function of the sensor´s position. Relaxation rates may be determined by fitting with multiple exponential decay functions or, more commonly, via a numerical data inversion, the so-called Inverse Laplace Transform (ILT) where the most favored on-dimensional algorithm is CONTIN [35]. The data acquired with a CPMG pulse sequence depend on molecular diffusion which, in the presence of the strong magnetic field gradient, will render an apparent relaxation time, T2D. The magnetization of a diffusing spin-bearing molecule in the presence of a constant magnetic field gradient during a CPMG sequence with echo time \({t}_{E}\) at the top of the \(m-th\) echo, decays as [36–38]:
$$\text{ln}\left(\frac{S\left(m{t}_{E}\right)}{{S}_{0}}\right)=-\left(\frac{1}{{T}_{2S}}+\frac{1}{12}{\left(\gamma G{t}_{E}\right)}^{2}D\right)m{t}_{E}=-\left(\frac{1}{{T}_{2D}}\right)m{t}_{E},$$
1
where \(\gamma\)is the gyromagnetic ratio of 1H and \(D\) the diffusion coefficient. \({T}_{2D}\) is the apparent relaxation time driven both by diffusion and surface relaxation, \({T}_{2S},\) which, in the surface-limited relaxation regime is expressed as [1, 5, 8]:
$$\frac{1}{{T}_{2S}}= \frac{1}{{T}_{2B}}+\frac{6{\rho }_{2}}{d}$$
2
,
where the bulk relaxation time of the fluid is \({T}_{2B}\), \({\rho }_{2}\) is the surface relaxivity and \(d\) is the pore diameter. To reduce as much as possible the influence of diffusion in Eq. (1), echo times must be set as short as possible. This implies that thousands of radiofrequency pulses must be applied, leading to the heating of the surface coil. The change in the coil’s resistance produces a shift of the signal’s phase and eventually a pulse drop. A straightforward solution to avoid coil heating beyond a critical level is to set the recycle delay between experiments to longer times than those usually applied in NMR, namely 3–5 T1. For the PM25 NMR MOUSE, considering the pulses of the CPMG as an on-period, and the recycle delay (\(rd\)) as an off-period, a duty cycle of 1.6 provides is good enough performance, with less than 3° dephasing. This sets the waiting time between experiments as \(rd={t}_{RF}*NE/1.6\), where \(NE\) is the total number of echoes to be acquired. It is then clear the total experimental time set by the relaxation time \({T}_{2D}\), is defined by the diffusion coefficient and the echo time.
A second factor to consider is the spatial resolution of the profile. As all radiofrequency pulses are applied in the presence of the magnetic field gradient, the length of the pulse can be used to select a desired slice thickness. However, multiple points can be acquired at the top of each echo and the acquisition time can be set to acquire the desired field of view of a rectangular slice in the direction of the gradient, or in this case the desired resolution (Res) [25, 39]. Setting the acquisition bandwidth constant, in this case, with a dwell-time of \(dw=\) 0.5 µs, the number of points to acquire in each echo are:
$$n= \text{round}\left(\frac{1}{G\bullet dw\bullet \text{Res}}\right)$$
3
.
For the used configuration this corresponds to \(n=\) 19 for a resolution of 350 µm and defines a minimum echo time of \({t}_{E}=\) 67.5 µs. As the slice thickness decreases, the number of acquired data points will increase. For instance, for a slice of 100 µm, \(n=\) 67 and \({t}_{E}=\) 91 µs. Figure 1A shows the transverse relaxation time values calculated with Eq. (1) as a function of the resolution for an arbitrary value of \({T}_{2S}\) = 500 ms and \(D=\) 1.10−9 m2/s. As the slice becomes thicker echo times are shorter, therefore the effective relaxation time increases its value. If the acquisition is to \({t}_{acq}=3{T}_{2D}\) the number of echoes increases from c.a. 4000 to 8500 for resolutions of 100 µm and 350 µm respectively. Therefore, the recycle delay for each of these resolutions changes from 24 s to 50 s respectively. Considering a minimum of 4 phase cycled scans, which are required to remove unwanted coherence pathways [40–43], the total experimental time calculated to acquire a single profile is shown in Fig. 1B. The number of slices required to map the complete proton density of a 1 cm sample decreases with increasing slice thickness. Even though relaxation times for thinner slices are shorter, the experimental time is much longer than that required for thicker slices. However, for the worst resolution achievable in the configuration used with the NMR-MOUSE, more than 90 hs are required for a single profile, a prohibitive time for monitoring dynamic processes.
2.2 Profiles with longitudinal relaxation times
Implementation of a saturation-recovery [44] sequence for T1 measurements is straightforward in single-side NMR as the presence of the strong magnetic field gradient is used to destroy the magnetization at the beginning of each experiment by applying an odd number of multiple 90° pulses separated by increasing time delays [25]. A given number of echoes, NE, can be accumulated to improve the SNR and are a key feature for obtaining shorter measurement times [32]. For liquids confined in a porous media with a distribution of pore sizes, a distribution of transverse relaxation times will be present, following Eq. (1). Addition of echoes inevitably introduces a contrast between fluid confined in small and large cavities that could hinder a correct quantification of the smaller voids. A threshold value must then be set, recently we proposed a penalty of 7% in the quantification of the populations associated with shorter relaxation times [32]. As echoes are coadded, the sum of NE echoes should satisfy the relation:
$$S\left(NE\right)={S}_{0}\left[\sum _{i=1}^{NE}\text{exp}\left(-\frac{i{t}_{E}}{{T}_{2D,Sh}}\right)\right]/NE={0.93 S}_{0}$$
4
.
where \({T}_{2D,Sh}\) is the shortest transverse relaxation time that depends both on the liquid/surface interactions and on diffusion.
Figure 2A ) Number of echoes that can be added in a T 1 measurement considering that the contrast of the shortest relaxation time, \({T}_{2D,S}\), is 93% from its zero-time value. As low resolution has a shorter echo time, a larger number of echoes can be acquired for a given relaxation time. B) Total experimental time for the acquisition of a saturation-recovery experiment for a single slice as a function of the longest relaxation time in a sample and the number of encoding points.
Figure 2 shows the number of echoes that can be added as a function of the shortest surface-defined transverse relaxation time,\({T}_{2S,Sh}\), and of the selected resolution. As shown in Fig. 1A, for each value of \({T}_{2S,Sh}\) the diffusion relaxation time changes as a function of the selected resolution, this is the reason that for a given surface-defined relaxation time, the number of echoes to add decreases with increasing resolution. For instance, for \({T}_{2S,Sh}=\) 60 ms, NE = 110 for a slice thickness of 350 µm and NE = 68 for a slice thickness of 100 µm.
Once a resolution is chosen, and the number of echos is set to define the maximum SNR achievable, the encoding strategy of T1 must be chosen. It is customary to sample the recovery curve to values of 3–5 T1S,L, where T1S,L stands for the longest surface-defined longitudinal relaxation time present in the sample. For the sake of speed, we use 3 T1S,L in the present work. Several encoding data points, NpT1 must be chosen with a compromise between numerical inversion accuracy and experimental time. Equally spaced recovery times in a logarithmic scale are considered, and the stability of the inversion procedure is discussed in the next section. Figure 2B shows the total experimental time for a single slice considering a fixed recycle delay of rd = 200 ms and 4 phase cycling steps which are needed to minimize the effect of unwanted coherence pathways. A sampling of 5 to 50 recovery times is considered. As an example, for T1S,L = 800 ms, 93 s are required for NpT1 = 50, while 15 s are required for NpT1 = 5.