Two rectangular pieces of cork are used to show the obtainable resolution in the image in Fig. 11b. It is possible to resolve the gap between the pieces, though this was too small to measure physically. To further demonstrate the advantage of UTE, Fig. 12 shows an image of 10 mm glass beads surrounded by rubber particles. The T2* for the rubber is 75 μs making it difficult to image with conventional techniques, however, the signal from the rubber is well resolved. The boundary of the glass bead shown in Fig. 12 is jagged in appearance. The image was acquired using 32 center-out radial spokes and is therefore significantly

under sampled in the azimuthal direction. Such under sampling could give rise to a jagged artifact KU-60019 in vitro but should be removed by the CS reconstruction. A more significant effect arises from the dimensions of the particles selleck chemical and the resolution of the image. The diameter of the rubber particles is 0.2–0.5 mm and close to the resolution of the image, 0.2 mm. Jagged or noise-like structure, as seen in Fig. 12, has frequently been seen in high resolution imaging of poppy seeds [36] where the diameter of the seeds is similar to the resolution of the image. The acquisition time of the image in Fig. 12 was 500 ms. Thus, these results demonstrate that UTE can provide high spatial and temporal resolution measurements on short T2 and T2* samples.

UTE has been shown as an efficient method of imaging short T2 and T2* systems. To accurately implement UTE it is necessary to have a thorough characterization of the gradients and r.f. amplifiers to be used. It is important to measure the shape of the r.f. and gradient pulses to determine whether these are balanced and timed correctly, especially when imaging short T2* materials. A gradient

pre-equalization strategy was used to improve the fidelity of the slice gradient shape and hence the slice excitation profile. The gradient pre-equalization method should be applicable 5-FU on almost any hardware system, including those commonly used in materials science and chemical engineering. The UTE sequence was validated using a sample that could also be imaged with a spin echo technique. The use of CS for image reconstruction significantly reduces the artifacts arising from under sampling and permits accurate image reconstruction from a reduced number of spokes, thus reducing the acquisition time. UTE was demonstrated on two simple test samples. In the future, the approach outlined here will enable UTE to be implemented on a variety of hardware systems and applications and hence will open new opportunities in engineering and material science. HTF would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Gates-Cambridge Trust. All authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the EPSRC (EP/K008218/1, EP/F047991/1 and EP/K039318/1).