Color-Coded MRI in Development to Make Scans Easier to Read

An engineering researcher is trying to bring color to the black-and-white realm of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to make the scans easier to read.

Dr. Li Sun, an associate professor of mechanical engineering in the University of Houston's (UH; TX, USA) Cullen College of Engineering, is working on developing a new class of contrast agents by using iron nanostructures to provide color to MR images for the first time. Dr. Sun recently received a three-year, US$300,000 grant from the US National Science Foundation for MRI research. Original funding came from a seed grant from the Alliance for Nanohealth. Project collaborators include Dr. Dong Liu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UH, and researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center (San Antonio, USA).

"Currently, MRIs are in black and white. If you use one of the existing contrasting agents, you only adjust the gray scale, which makes the bright parts of the image brighter and the dark parts darker. These new nanostructures will allow you to use different colors to identify each type of tissue," Dr. Sun said.

Most nanostructures are shaped like rods or spheres. Iron nanostructures come in less common shapes, such as dumbbells or tubes, and respond only to a specific magnetic frequency. But unusual shapes are expensive to produce at the necessary nanolevel, prompting Sun to work on a more economical fabrication method for these structures. After these nanostructures are generated, they will be coated in proteins that bond only with certain types of cells, such as those that make up a ligament or a specific internal organ.

In a clinical environment, these new agents will be introduced into a patient, typically in a liquid that will be injected. The patient will then undergo MRI scanning, with the machine programmed to scan at the magnetic frequencies assigned to the different nanostructures injected into the patient. The MRI unit will assign each type of nanostructure it senses a particular color--such as red for a ligament and blue for bone. The scans will be combined into a single, color-coded image.

According to Dr. Sun, creating easier-to-read MRI scans is not the only use for these new nanostructures. Individual cells, such as stem cells, could be tagged with the nanostrucutures and then tracked in the human body. Moreover, nanostructures that bond with cancer cells could be heated with a high-frequency magnetic field, destroying the cancer cells but leaving nearby healthy cells intact, Dr. Sun reported.

"This is high-risk, high-reward research," concluded Dr. Sun. "If we're successful, we'll not only change how much we can learn from an MRI, but impact a lot of other areas of healthcare and research."

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University of Houston
University of Texas Health Science Center