μ-ViP: Customized virtual phantom for quantitative magnetic resonance micro-imaging at high magnetic field.

The applications of Magnetic Resonance micro-Imaging (MRμI) cover nowadays a wide range of fields. However few of them present quantitative measurements when the sample of interest changes over time or in case of a long acquisition time. In this domain, two challenges have to be overcome: the introduction of a phantom as a reference signal and the guarantee that this signal is stable over the experiment duration while some conditions such as temperature and/or the moisture are varied. The aim of the present study was to implement a dedicated experimental set-up to generate a virtual phantom (ViP) signal in a vertical-bore 11.7 T NMR spectrometer, equipped with a micro-imaging probe. This study shows that the generation of a micro-imaging-dedicated ViP (μ-ViP) signal is of great benefit for on-line quality control of the spectrometer performance during acquisition in the case of real-time experiments. Thus, μViP represents a step towards improvement of the magnetic resonance signal quantification in small samples.