Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)

BACKGROUND & AIMS: The gold standard in assessing liver fibrosis is biopsy despite limitations like invasiveness and sampling error and complications including morbidity and mortality. Therefore, there is a major unmet medical need to quantify fibrosis non-invasively to facilitate early diagnosis of chronic liver disease and provide a means to monitor disease progression. The goal of this study was to evaluate the ability of several magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques to stage liver fibrosis.

PURPOSE: To determine the feasibility of detecting thrombi using a fibrin-specific gadolinium-based magnetic resonance imaging contrast agent, EP-2104R.
METHODS: Subjects with confirmed thrombus in the venous system (n = 14), or in the heart, or arterial system (n = 38) were enrolled. Patients were imaged before and at various times following a 4 mumol/kg intravenous bolus injection of EP-2104R:

Thirty years ago, Schering filed the first patent application for a contrast agent for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) covering the forefather of the gadolinium contrast agents and still the most widely used gadolinium probe: gadolinium(III) diethylenetriaminepentaacetate (Magnevist). To date, 11 contrast agents have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for intravenous use. Coordination chemists have done a great deal to move the field forward.

OBJECTIVES: Recent advances in the design of MRI contrast agents have rendered the lanthanide complexes of DOTA-tetraamide ligands of considerable interest, both as responsive MR agents and paramagnetic chemical exchange saturation transfer agents. The potential utility of these complexes for in vivo applications is contingent upon them being well tolerated by the body. The purpose of this study was to examine how the nature of the amide substituent, and in particular its charge, affected the fate of these chelates postinjection.

A generalization of the modified SBM theory is developed in closed analytical form. The theory is applied to describe the paramagnetically enhanced water proton spin-lattice relaxation rates of the aqueous-systems containing a gadolinium(S=7/2) complex(MS-325) in the presence or absence of human serum albumin (HSA). MS-325 binds to HSA: in the absence of the protein the reorientational time, tauR, is short, but when HSA is added tauR becomes much longer.

Blood-clot formation that results in the complete occlusion of a blood vessel (thrombosis) often leads to serious life-threatening events, such as strokes and heart attacks. As the composition of a thrombus changes as it matures, new imaging methods that are capable of distinguishing new clots from old clots may yield important diagnostic and prognostic information. To address this need, an activatable magnetic resonance (MR) probe that is responsive to a key biochemical process associated with recently formed clots has been developed.

Dysprosium complexes can serve as transverse relaxation (T(2)) agents for water protons through chemical exchange and the Curie spin relaxation mechanism. Using a pair of matched dysprosium(III) complexes, Dy-L1 (contains one inner-sphere water) and Dy-L2 (no inner-sphere water), it is shown that the transverse relaxation of bulk water is predominantly an inner-sphere effect. The kinetics of water exchange at Dy-L1 were determined by (17)O NMR. Proton transverse relaxation by Dy-L1 at high fields is governed primarily through a large chemical shift difference between free and bound water.

Pulsed 17O Mims electron-nuclear double resonance (ENDOR) spectroscopy at the W band (95 GHz) and D band (130 GHz) is used for the direct determination of the water coordination number (q) of gadolinium-based magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agents. Spectra of metal complexes in frozen aqueous solutions at approximately physiological concentrations can be obtained either in the presence or absence of protein targets.