A GENERAL SURVEY OF CHOCOLATE CONFECTIONERY BY MAGNETIC-RESONANCE-IMAGING

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used to survey the structure of a range of chocolate products, including tablet, straightline and countline products: typically two dimensional MRI at 2 Tesla gives 50 X 50 mm spatial resolution for a 3 mm thick slice in 8 mins. High sign al intensity and excellent image contrast is obtained for nuts or othe r fat fillings; however, dried fruits and biscuit both show a low sign al intensity Quantitative MRI of the bars provides diverse measurement of the MRI parameters M-0, T-1, T-2. Although the image contrast from T-1 variations is small that from T-2 is substantial. Thus, whereas c hocolate has T-2 values in the range 9 to 17 ms, the T-2 values for nu ts and fat fillings are high (> 40 ms), and consequently the)? show wi th high intensity in spin echo sequences with echo time (TE) = 6 ms. ( C) 1998 Academic Press Limited.