Development of a Single-Sided Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Scanner for the In Vivo Quantification of Live Cattle Marbling

Non-invasive in vivo marbling quantification helps owners to choose the optimum nutritional management for growing cattle and buyers to more precisely evaluate grown cattle at auctions. When using time-domain proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxometry, it is possible to quantify muscle and fat separately by taking advantage of the difference in the spin–spin relaxation time (T2) between water molecules in muscles and fat molecules, which would contribute to the non-invasive and objective determination of marbling scores. With this in mind, we developed a prototype NMR scanner (4.1 MHz for protons) using an original single-sided magnetic circuit and a plane radio frequency (RF) coil for use in the non-invasive quantification of water and fat in live cattle. The sensed region of the developed scanner is compact and almost cubical (19 × 19 × 16 mm3) while the investigation depth (the distance from the RF coil to the center of the sensed region) has been lengthened to 30 mm, which is sufficient for the in vivo trapezius muscle measurement of live cattle. Measurements of 17 samples of beef meat blocks kept at 39 °C were taken in a laboratory to successfully obtain the calibration lines used to convert the NMR signals into water and fat weight fractions at correlation coefficients in excess of 0.9. We also showed that each meat sample could be measured in about 10 s with a measurement error as small as approximately 10 wt%. Accordingly, we believe that our prototype scanner would be useful for in vivo marbling measurements of live cattle trapezius muscles.