To develop in vivo imaging with pigs as a precursor to human studies in a whole-body 10.5 T MR system.Recently, our 10.5T MRI magnet achieved field strength and its installation was completed. This represents the highest whole-body operational system for human MR imaging. Before imaging humans, however, we must obtain both IRB and Investigational Device Exemption approval. Until then, we are using anesthetized human-sized pigs to gather preliminary data for those approvals and taking the opportunity to refine hardware systems and procedures for in vivo imaging.A human-sized pig was anesthetized according to our approved IACUC protocol and imaged as a surrogate for later human studies. The 10.5T / 88 cm whole body magnet by Agilent (Santa Clara, CA) is currently the world’s highest strength whole-body MR magnet. To achieve this field strength, the passively shielded magnet shown in Figure 1 is 4.1 m long and 3.2 m wide, and contains 433 km of NbTi wire cooled to below 3 K. The 88 cm warm-bore accommodates commercial whole-body gradients, which in this case is an SC72 body gradient (Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, DE) with 70 mT/m maximum amplitude and 200 T/m/s maximum slew rate. Anticipating increased susceptibility inhomogeneities, the system was outfitted with five 2nd order shims and four 3rd order shims each driven by a 20 A power supply. The width of the bore liner tube (patient space) is the standard whole-body 60 cm. The Siemens MAGNETOM console has 32 receive channels and 16 parallel transmit waveform generators driving 16 2-kW RF amplifiers (Stolberg HF-Technik AG, Stolberg, DE). A 16-channel Transmit/Receive interface with integrated pre-amplifiers (Virtumed LLC, Minneapolis, MN) was connected to an 8-channel end-loaded dipole head coil. The elements are 16 cm long (two 8 cm segments) and arranged on a cylinder with an inner diameter of 25 cm. The end-loaded dipole has a perpendicular plate on the end-walls of the cylinder to fore-shorten the elements and has been previously modeled.¹ The head of an anesthetized and ventilated 35 kg pig, outfitted with patient monitoring equipment, was loaded into the coil in supine position. The 8-channel coil was B₁ shimmed over the brain and the flip angle in the brain was calibrated.^2-4 Gradient echo images were collected with the following parameters: α = 6°, TR/TE=50/3.39 ms, 256x256, 0.77 x 0.77 x 3 (mm)³, NEX=2. Turbo spin-echoes with the same resolution, one acquisition, TR/TE = 5000/60 ms, 130° refocusing pulses, and an echo train length of 7 were also acquired.The B₁ shim over the brain resulted in an excitation pattern in the brain that was higher near the throat but rapidly dropped off outside the brain in the central area of the throat and intubation tube. Transverse and coronal slices from a GRE sequence are shown in Figures 2 and 3, respectively. Figure 4 is a TSE image with the same slice as Figure 3.The images presented demonstrate that most of the procedures for in vivo imaging are operational. There is no evidence of noise leaking into the images. B₁ shimming is working, at least for this relatively small target. Most of the animal/patient monitoring equipment either works or needs only minor adjustments, such as longer cabling to reach into the long bore or to keep equipment further from the magnet fringe field.The first in vivo images were collected from the 10.5T whole-body MRI.