Hp gas was compressed by pressurizing the piston with >100 kPa of http://www.selleckchem.com/JAK.html N2, leading to the scenario depicted in Fig. 3e. The extraction–compression unit was then opened to either a detection cell for polarization

measurements or to the storage volume (VB) for lung MRI. Polarization measurements and T1 relaxation of either hp gas–O2 mixtures in a bulk gas phase were conducted in a vertical bore 9.4 T superconducting magnet (Oxford Instruments, UK) equipped with a Magritek Kea 2 spectrometer (Wellington, New Zealand) using 15 mm custom build probes tuned to the resonance frequency of 129Xe (110.56 MHz) and of 83Kr (15.38 MHz). T1 relaxation measurements in the excised lung were performed in a vertical bore 9.4 T Bruker Avance III microimaging system using a 25 mm 129Xe custom build birdcage probe tuned to 110.69 MHz. MRI experiments were performed in a vertical bore 9.4 T Bruker Avance III microimaging system. A custom build 25 mm birdcage probe

tuned to 110.69 MHz and a commercial 30 mm probe (Bruker Corporation, Billerica, Massachusetts, USA) tuned to 15.40 MHz were used for 129Xe or 83Kr imaging experiments, respectively. 129Xe images were acquired using a variable flip Selleckchem Nutlin 3 angle (VFA) FLASH sequence [29] using 64 gradient increments in phase-encoding dimension resulting in a total image acquisition time of 13.8 s. The resulting data size was 128 × 64 with the field of view (FOV) of 46.9 × 30.0 mm2 in the frequency encoding and in the phase encoding dimensions, respectively. An MRI image of a 4 mm central slice

of the lung in coronal orientation was obtained using sinc-shaped pulses with 1 ms in length and a variable amplitude for each phase encoding gradient increment. A subsequent non-slice selective image was obtained using rectangular pulses with variable amplitudes during the same inhalation cycle. 83Kr image data were collected using VFA FLASH sequence with 32 phase encoding gradient increments resulting in the final data size of 64 × 32. Variable amplitude 0.8 ms gaussian pulses or 2.0 ms sinc-shaped pulses were used in image acquisition. Endonuclease The total acquisition time was either 0.57 s or 0.62 s depending on the length of the used excitation pulse. The resulting image length was either 51.0 mm or 50.9 mm in the frequency encoding and 38.1 mm or 40.7 mm in the phase-encoding dimension, respectively. Data were processed using Prospa (v. 3.06; Magritek, New Zealand). The data were apodized in both dimensions using sine-bell squared function prior to the image reconstruction further image processing and analysis were performed with IGOR Pro (v 6.11, Wavemetrics, USA). Male Sprague–Dawley rats (Charles River, Margate, UK) weighing 360–450 g were used in this study. These weights of rat were chosen as they roughly corresponded to the maximum lung size that would fit into the ventilation chamber (Fig. 8). Rats were humanely euthanized by overdose of pentobarbital (Sigma–Aldrich Ltd.