Selective microstructure-size filters for non-invasive quantitative imaging by mag- netic resonance

ANALIA ZWICK; MILENA CAPIGLIONI; PABLO JIMÉNEZ; GONZALO A. ALVAREZ

Congreso; RAFA, 106 nd National meeting of the Argentinian Physics Association; 2021

Extracting quantitative microstructure information of living tissue by non-invasive imaging is an outstandingchallenge for understanding disease mechanisms and allowing early stage diagnosis of pathologies. Magnetic Reso-nance Imaging (MRI) is a promising and widely used technique to pursue this goal, but still provides low resolutionto reveal microstructure details [1]. We here report on a method to produce images of filtered microstructure-sizesbased on selective probing of nuclear-spin dephasing induced by the molecular diffusion within specific tissue-compartments [2]. The microstructure-size filter relies on suitable dynamical control of nuclear spins that sensemagnetization decay-shifts rather than the commonly used spin-echo decay-rates. The feasibility and performanceof the method are illustrated with proof-of-principle experiments and simulations on typical size-distributions ofwhite-matter in the mouse brain [3]. These results show that spin-echo decay-shifts can be a new MRI paradigmto advance towards unravelling diagnostic information based on microstructure parameters that characterize bio-logical tissues.Referencias:[1] A. Zwick, D. Suter, G. Kurizki, G. A. Álvarez, Phys. Rev. Applied 14, 024088, (2020).[2] M. Capiglioni, A. Zwick, P. Jiménez, G. A. Álvarez. Proc. Intl. Soc. Mag. Reson. Med. 29, 2036 (2021)[3] M. Capiglioni, A. Zwick, P. Jiménez, G. A. Álvarez, Phys. Rev. Applied 15, 014045 (2021).