Deconvolution techniques for removing the effects of chemical shift in 19F nuclear magnetic resonance imaging of perfluorocarbon compounds.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging of perfluorocarbon (PFC) emulsions and neat liquids has shown potential for in vivo oxygen imaging in blood and organ tissue. PFC compounds exhibit complicated NMR spectra caused by chemical shifts and spin-spin couplings which can lead to artifacts and degraded spatial resolution of resulting NMR images. To correct for the chemical shift artifacts, the technique of spectral deconvolution has been applied to NMR imaging of PFC compounds. The temporal filter for this process can be directly applied to raw free induction decay data in projection reconstruction or to spin-echo data in two-dimensional Fourier transform imaging techniques. The effect of chemical shift artifacts was demonstrated through the NMR imaging of two PFC compounds (F-tributylamine and F-decalin) in phantoms. Methods are presented and demonstrated which allow the chemical shift artifacts to be removed and true images of the spatial distribution of the PFC's to be recovered.