Technologies

Background

A goal of molecular imaging is to produce quantitative maps of the distribution of a particular tracer or endogenous substance with the resolution characteristic of the chosen method of detection. For this to be accomplished, a quantitative relationship must exist between an image parameter and the imaging agent’s concentration. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been successful in medicine due to the richness of the set of spin manipulations that introduce specific contrast variations in tissue.

The range of applications of MRI has been expanded through the discovery and usage of agents that introduce image contrastviaperturbations of the magnetic relaxation rates of nearby nuclei. MRI contrast is a complex, non-linear function of the concentration of contrast agents on nuclear relaxation rates. However, as long as these non-linearities give rise to single-valued, monotonic dependences of contrast on the agent concentration, it is possible to anticipate these nonlinear effects through theory and then to use these relationships to measure the concentration of a given contrast agent in a particular imaging slice.

Technology Description

A researcher at the University of New Mexico has developed a novel, quantitative MRI system for the measurement of nanoscale magnetic objects introduced into biological systems. This method termed FeMRI (pronounced fem-ree) can be applied to determine the concentration of iron through MR images into Fe images, along with the study of temporal and spatial disposition of SPIONs in tumors, especially prostate tumors. This new ability to directly, and simply, measure the amount of a nanoparticle, or other magnetic material using standard MRI, will enhance a large class of nanotechnology studies.