MRI

Carnegie Mellon scientists develop tool that uses MRI to visualize gene expression in living animals

In a first, Carnegie Mellon University scientists have "programmed" cells to make their own contrast agents, enabling unprecedented high-resolution, deep-tissue imaging of gene expression. The results, appearing in the April issue of Nature Medicine, hold considerable promise for conducting preclinical studies in the emerging field of molecular therapeutics and for monitoring the delivery of ther...

PET/MRI scans may help unravel mechanisms of prenatal drug damage

Scientists have demonstrated a new way to assess the potentially damaging effects of prenatal drug exposure--a technique that could also be used to monitor a fetus's response to therapeutic drugs--using sophisticated, noninvasive medical imaging tools. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, whose findings are reported in the February issue of the Society of...

Love's all in the brain: fMRI study shows strong, lateralized reward, not sex, drive

You just can't tell where you might find love these days. A team led by a neuroscientist, an anthropologist and a social psychologist found love-related neurophysiological systems inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine. They detected quantifiable love responses in the brains of 17 young men and women who each described themselves as being newly and madly in love. The multidisciplinary...

Whole-body MRI Takes Less Than 20 Min To Scan A Patient's Entire Body For Cancer Spread To Bone

Whole-body MRI with an automatic moving table is effective for evaluating the entire skeleton in patients with suspected bone metastasis (cancer that has spread to the bone from other parts of the body) in a single imaging scan-and it only takes between 15 and 18 minutes, say two different European studies. For one study, researchers from the Clinica Girona in Catalonia, Spain, performed w...

'Gadonanotubes' greatly outperform existing MRI contrast agents

Researchers at Rice University, the Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Houston and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have created a new class of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agents that are at least 40 times more effective than the best in clinical use. The new agents -- dubbed gadonanotubes -- use the same highly toxic metal, gadolinium, t...

Researchers know what you were about to say; fMRI used to detect memory storage and retrieval

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University have provided evidence that the act of recalling a memory is a bit like mental time travel. Their study, presented in the Dec. 23 edition of the journal Science, demonstrates that the same areas of the brain that are active during an event are activated when a person attem...

New MRI technique shows emphysema in asymptomatic smokers

-A new imaging method has revealed early signs of emphysema in smokers with no external symptoms of the disease, according to a study published in the June issue of Radiology. The study, supported by the National Institutes of Health, details a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that appears to be much more sensitive to lung changes than even the current modality of choice, computed t...

New MRI technique quickly builds 3-D images of knees

A faster magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data-acquisition technique will cut the time many patients spend in a cramped magnetic resonance scanner, yet deliver more precise 3-D images of their bodies. Developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the faster technique will enable clinics to image more patients - particularly the burgeoning group of older adults with osteoarthritis-rela...

NYU researchers decorate virus particles, showing potential to enhance MRI capabilities

Researchers at New York University have made chemical modifications to nanometer sized virus particles--a process that has the potential to improve magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques. Their results are reported in the latest issue of Nano Letters. The study was conducted jointly by NYU's Department of Chemistry and the Department of Radiology at the NYU School of Medicine. The stu...

New fMRI technology making brain tumor surgery safer

Brain specialists at The Neuroscience Institute at University Hospital and the University of Cincinnati have taken a significant step forward in their quest to treat difficult tumors while preserving areas of the brain that are responsible for speech and movement. The Cincinnati specialists are among the first in the country to use new technology that integrates functional MRI (fMRI) data into h...

Researchers use MRI to predict recovery after spinal cord injury

"Our study demonstrates that the possibility and extent of neurological recovery after SCI can be predicted within 48 hours after injury by rigorou...