Introduction. Magnetic Resonance (MR) technique, commonly used for anatomical imaging, can also assess dielectric properties (DPs) of biological tissues. These properties represent tissues’ response to an electromagnetic field and reveal their biophysical characteristics aiding in the monitoring of many pathologies. Since traditional techniques for DPs’ characterization need manipulation of the sample, it is fundamental to exploit techniques as MR for their determination.

Objectives. This work adopts the MR-Electric Properties Tomography (EPT) approach to derive the conductivity of four water-based mixtures in a fast and in vivo applicable way.

Materials and methods. Four mixtures characterised by different conductivity values, resembling those of biological tissues, were realised. Their conductivity was measured using the MR-EPT forward Helmholtz method in two steps. First, the phase of the radiofrequency transmit magnetic induction B₁ was measured using a 3 T Siemens scanner and a vendor provided spin echo-based RF map sequence. Secondly, mixtures’ conductivity was derived, from the phase, at the resonance frequency of the scanner (128 MHz) using EPTlib application. The procedure was repeated twice to test the results’ repeatability. To validate MR results, mixtures’ conductivity was also measured with the open-ended probe technique.

Results. The conductivity values obtained through MR are in agreement among the two repetitions and with reference data as shown in the figure below. For each mixture results are reported with boxplots and reference data in green.

Conclusion. The MR-based procedure presented in this work for the measurement of mixtures’ conductivity is in vivo adoptable, fast and straightforward to implement.