Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

NMR remote detection is a new technique in which the signal detection location is physically separated from the sample location where NMR or MRI information is encoded. A mobile NMR-active sensor medium interacts with the host sample without altering it, and information of that sample environment is encoded with radio frequency (rf) and field gradient pulses as longitudinal magnetization of the sensor. After the sensor has left the sample, its magnetization is read out with an optimized detector, which often can be made much more sensitive than the circuit used to encode the information. Remote detection fully capitalizes on the unique strength of NMR, the wealth of encoding possibilities, while providing a means to overcome its inherent weak point, the low sensitivity.