NMR Microimaging for Noninvasive Investigation of Polymers

고분자의 비파괴 연구를 위한 핵자기 공명 현미영상법

Polymers have been one of the emerging biomedical materials in the area of biomedical research which are applicable to the human body. For human applications, noninvasive characterization of the biomedical polymers has been one of the important topics, and is valuable information. Among others, the swelling rate is one of the important measurements needed for the hydrophilic polymers. NMR imaging has been a suitable method for the noninvasive study of such a material since it is sensitive to many physical and biochemical changes of the specimens. In addition, NMR techniques possess many useful intrinsic properties such as the relaxation and diffusion effects. The present study has provided a noble and noninvasive method of measuring the process of swelling as well as volumetric changes occurred in polymers and drug delivery processes in a drug delivery system (DDS) together with changes of released drug. This gives information, relating with both water ingress process, volumetric changes of polymer specimens and the visualization of sequential drug delivery process. Also, this study provides more reliable method to ascertain the time dependent swelling process compared to the conventional method. The important aspects is that the proposed method is truly noninvasive and is able to ascertain time dependent processes.