Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is widely used throughout clinical medicine
today with applications in cancer, basic neuroscience, cardiovascular disease, drug development and pre-clinical research. It has achieved this impressive role in just two decades due to its non-invasive nature coupled with the rich array of potential NMR signals that can be applied to biological problems. Standard among these are NMR relaxation times, chemical shift spectroscopy, hyperpolarization and J-coupling, but less well known is the capability to measure features such as temperature, tissue magnetic susceptibility, diffusion and micro-scale motion. In this seminar, I will review the mechanism of how MRI can image time dependent fields of 3D motion which span dimensional scales ranging from 10-9 to 10-2 meters with a frequency range of 1-106 Hz. When coupled with the appropriate physical models, this capability has been shown to permit estimation of new signals of biological interest including tissue biomechanical properties, cardiovascular fluid/tissue dynamics and the visualization of non-linear ultrasound propagation in tissue