Direct magnetic resonance imaging of histological tissue samples at 3.0T

Direct imaging of a histological slice is challenging. The vast difference in dimension between planar size and the thickness of histology slices would require an RF coil to produce a uniform RF magnetic (B₁) field in a 2D plane with minimal thickness. In this work a novel RF coil designed specifically for imaging a histology slice was developed and tested. The experimental data demonstrate that the coil is highly sensitive and capable of producing a uniform B₁ field distribution in a planar region of histological slides, allowing for the acquisition of high-resolution T ₂ images and T₂ maps from a 60-μm-thick histological sample. The image intensity and T₂ distributions were directly compared with histological staining of the relative iron concentration of the same slice. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using a microimaging histological coil to image thin slices of pathologically diseased tissue to obtain a precise one-to-one comparison between stained tissue and MR images.