A major limitation to the use of NMR as a sensing technique in clinical imaging is the low intrinsic sensitivity. As a result, the spatial and contrast resolution and scan speed are limited, with design gains in one requiring trade-offs of the others. In recent years several fundamental sources of detection noise have been identified and evaluated for medical NMR imaging. They are: thermal noise in the receiver coils, loading by the body conductivity and capacitance, and deflection of radiation by conductivity gradients. In the present paper we review these sources of contrast degradation and several other sources, including tissue-generated noise and shot noise, and show how to refine the estimates for diffractive effects at the skin surface. A quantitative example of signal/ noise estimation is presented for whole-body imaging.

Date Published: 29 December 1982
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 0347, Application of Optical Instrumentation in Medicine X, (29 December 1982); doi: 10.1117/12.933852

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0347:
Application of Optical Instrumentation in Medicine X
Gary D. Fullerton; James A. Mulvaney; Arthur G. Haus; William S. Properzio, Editor(s)