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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2008 Sep 1.
Published in final edited form as: Methods. 2007 Sep;43(1):35–45. doi: 10.1016/j.ymeth.2007.03.012

Figure 1.

Figure 1

(A) An example radiofrequency (RF) solenoid coil (Philips Research, Hamburg, Germany) specially designed for small rodent imaging. This coil has an inner bore size of 7 cm and a length of 9.7 cm. The animal is placed on the cradle (B) and inserted into the RF coil. In this example, MR-compatible ECG electrodes are attached to the paws of a mouse. Leads are affixed to the electrodes and connected to an electro-optical converting box that converts the ECG signal for fiber optic transmission to the MR scanner. Similar ECG monitoring systems are available on other clinical MR scanners. Third-party, MR-compatible physiological monitoring and gating systems may also be used in place of these ECG monitoring systems. The head of the animal is placed in a nose cone (e.g., 60 cc syringe in A) which supplies inhaled anesthesia to the animal during imaging. If injectable anesthesia is used, no nose cone is necessary. Clinical surface coils, such as those developed for imaging human carotid artery, also work well for small rodent CMR, as they are designed to image at penetration depths similar to that of small rodent hearts in vivo.