Berkeley, Calif. – The MRI machine that most doctors use to get three-dimensional images of everything from strained knee ligaments to ovarian cysts could become 10,000 times more sensitive with a xenon gas technique devised at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The boost in resolution would allow doctors to track biological processes at the molecular level and could be extremely useful for diagnosing early stages of cancer or heart disease.
“If it works as well as we hope it will, it will be a significant advance in cancer detection,” said chemist David Wemmer, a member of the team at Berkeley Lab and the University of California, Berkeley that developed the imaging technique.
Their findings were published Friday in the journal Science.
Wemmer and his colleagues found a way to use xenon atoms to highlight specific types of molecules, such as the proteins found on the outside of cancer cells, in very low concentrations.
Conventional magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, isn’t sensitive enough to see cancerous cells until a fair amount have accumulated. The xenon amplifies the signal of these cells, allowing them to be seen more easily.
“The key to really diagnosing disease earlier and earlier is to start to look at the differences in the molecular expression that’s taking place,” said atomic physicist Bastiaan Driehuys at Duke University Medical Center. “It’s thought that we’ll see things earlier and we’ll be much more sensitive than if you wait until there’s some functional or anatomical consequence of these molecular processes.”
The xenon technique can also image several different types of molecules at the same time, which is beneficial for diagnosing specific types of cancer.
“The best analogy is if you were able to look with your eye, it would be the equivalent of having several different colors,” Wemmer said. “With conventional magnetic resonance imaging … even if you can tell a tissue is cancerous, sometimes there are many different types of cancer in the same organ.”
