Relaxation

Last revised by Andrew Murphy on 2 Apr 2020

Relaxation is the process in which spins release the energy received from a radiofrequency pulse. MRI signal is influenced, among other factors, by different types of relaxation:

Relaxation causes MR signal to recover in the longitudinal direction according to the time constant T1 (Figure 1) or decay in the transverse plane according to the time constant T2 (Figure 2).

The differences in relaxation between different tissues form the basis of image contrast (signal to noise ratio) in MRI.

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