Over the past decade, cellular and molecular imaging has attracted attention owing to its ability to monitor biological processes in living organisms at the cellular and molecular levels. Because of the intrinsic sensitivity of intermolecular double quantum coherence (iDQC) signals to changes in susceptibility structures and magnetization, iDQC imaging could provide a fundamentally different contrast compared to the conventional MRI contrast[1,2].
In this study, we applied iDQC imaging to the detection of iron-labeled cells in a micro-imaging system (14.1 T). We systematically analyzed the contrast behaviors of iDQC MR images by comparing them with conventional MR images for the iron-labeled single cells.