Magnetic resonance imaging of microvessels using iron-oxide nanoparticles

The visualization of microstructures including blood vessels with an inner overall cross-sectional area below approximately 200 mu m remains beyond the capabilities of current clinical imaging modalities. But with magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, magnetic entities cause susceptibility artifacts in the images by disrupting the homogeneous magnetic field in a much larger scale than their actual size. As validated in this paper through simulation and in-vitro experiments, these artifacts can serve as a source of contrast, enabling microvessels with an inner diameter below the spatial resolution of any medical imaging modalities to be visualized using a clinical MR scanner. For such experiments, micron-sized agglomerations of iron-oxide (Fe3O4) nanoparticles were injected in microchannels with internal diameters of 200 and 50 mu m equivalent to a narrower artery or a larger arteriole, and down to a smaller arteriole, respectively. The results show the feasibility of the proposed method for micro-particle detection and the visualization of microvessels using a 1.5 T clinical MR scanner. It was confirmed that the method is reproducible and accurate at the sub-pixel level. (C) 2013 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4797484]