Contrast manipulation in NMR imaging

The past few years have shown rapid growth of NMR imaging in both image quality and diagnostic usefulness. It has become apparent, as the images have been published, that both inter- and intra-group imaging of the same underlying pathology produces images which can have vastly differing appearance. This effect is mainly due to imaging techniques which use different pulse sequence types and timings thus varying the relative contribution of the protpn density, T₁, and T₂ properties of the tissues. In this paper we investigate the contrast manipulation effects and methods for SNR optimization for the saturation recovery, inversion recovery, spin echo, and inversion recovery spin echo pulse sequences when applied to three clinically relevant imaging tasks.