Abstract
In this study, we report the spin-lattice relaxation rate of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and normal liver tissue in rats using a high-Tc superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) based nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. The resonance spectrometer used for discriminating liver tumors in rats via the difference in longitudinal relaxation time in low magnetic fields was set up in a compact and portable magnetic shielding box. The frequency-domain NMR signals of HCC tissues and normal liver tissues were analyzed to study their respective longitudinal relaxation rate T1 −1. The T1 −1 of liver tissues for ten normal rats and ten cancerous rats were investigated respectively. The averaged T1 −1 value of normal liver tissue was (6.41±0.66) s−1, and the averaged T1 −1 value of cancerous tissue was (3.38±0.15) s−1. The ratio of T1 −1 for normal liver tissues and cancerous liver tissues of the rats investigated is estimated to be 1.9. Since this significant statistical difference, the T1 −1 value can be used to distinguish the HCC tissues from normal liver tissues. This method of examining liver and tumor tissues has the advantages of being convenient, easy to operate, and stable.
Highlights
Though sharing the same origin, there are still some morphologic distinctions that exist between normal and cancerous tissue
The data were normalized to the strength of saturated nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signals to distinguish the signal characteristics for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tissues and normal liver tissues
First we found that the minimum specimen weight that can register a stable T121 value is 0.85 grams for normal liver tissue, and 0.23 grams for tumor tissue
Summary
Though sharing the same origin, there are still some morphologic distinctions that exist between normal and cancerous tissue. Nowadays, trained pathologists can discern the differences with certain kinds of immunohistochemical staining under microscopic examination. These are well-accepted tools for confirming the diagnosis of malignant diseases, and are the main approach we employed to evaluate unknown specimens obtained from biopsy. The development of NMR measurement using SQUID detection in low magnetic fields [2,3,4,5], has been reported as well. We established a high-Tc SQUID-based low magnetic field nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) system to measure the longitudinal relaxation rate T121 of tap water in a magnetically shielded environment [7], where T121 is the spinlattice relaxation rate. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most important malignancy in Asia [9], so we used HCC and normal liver parenchyma of rats as our first experiment subject to appraise the method’s feasibility
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