Investigation of NMR limits of detection for implantable microcoils

Although NMR has the ability to investigate biological systems non-destructively, its low sensitivity primarily has hampered their investigation compared to other analytical techniques. Therefore, optimizing radio frequency (RF) coils to improve sensitivity do offer benefits in MR spectroscopy (MRS). Sensitivity may be improved for mass- and volume- limited samples if the size of the detection RF coils matches the sample size. In this paper, the mass- and concentration-limit of detection (LOD_m, LOD_c) for an implantable microcoil will be estimated by MRS measurements and then compared with their analytical values. For a sample containing a solution of several cerebral metabolites, for the Choline case, the LOD_m is 5.7-10^-9 mol and LOD_c of 3.8 mM. These preliminary results enable to open largely the biomedical applications based on cerebral metabolism investigation on small animal experiments.