After ten years of development, a new method of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that could spot dangerous health conditions in minutes, before they become a problem, has become reality.
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A new MRI could routinely spot specific cancers, multiple sclerosis, heart disease and other conditions in their early phase when they're most treatable, write researchers at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center in the journal Nature.
"The overall goal is to specifically identify individual tissues and diseases, to hopefully see things and quantify things before they become a problem. But to try to get there, we've had to give up everything we knew about the MRI and start over," said Mark Griswold, a radiology professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. He has been working on that problem with Case Western Reserve's Vikas Gulani, MD, an assistant professor of radiology, and Nicole Seiberlich, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, for ten years.
Each body tissue and disease has a unique fingerprint that can be used to quickly diagnose problems. For example, the team differentiated white matter from gray matter from cerebrospinal fluid in the brain in about 12 seconds, and that could be done much faster in the near future. A full-body scan lasting just minutes would provide more information and ease interpretation of the data, making diagnostics cheap compared to today's scans.
An MRI device uses a magnetic field and pulses of radio waves to create images of tissues and body structures. Magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) can obtain much more information with each measurement than a traditional MRI. It's based on the fact that each body tissue and every disease has a unique fingerprint that can be used to diagnose problems fast, which means that MRF can collect a big amount of information in just one measurement.
For example, an MRI would show swelling as a bright area but brightness doesn't necessarily shows the severity of the condition or its cause. The goal of MRF is to go one step further, to be able to tell exactly what's happening in the affected area.
The researchers are simultaneously varying different parts of the input electromagnetic fields that probe the tissues. These variations make the received signal sensitive to four physical properties that vary from tissue to tissue. Information are then processed by pattern recognition software and the results show whether tissue is healthy or not, how badly is hit and by what disease. The scientists believe that they will be able to interrogate a total of eight or nine physical properties.
For a patient, an MRF would seem like a quick MRI. Other researchers have tried to use multiple parameters in MRI's, but this group was able to scan fast and with a high sensitivity. The group expects to reduce scanning time and build the library of conditions over the next few years. ■