MRF Will Detect Various Grave Illnesses At The Early Stages

Scientists at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center claim that a new method of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) could detect various illnesses at the early stages, when they’re most treatable. A magnetic resonance imager uses a magnetic field and pulses of radio waves to create images of the body’s tissues and structures. Magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) can get much more information than a traditional MRI. Each body tissue and disease has a unique fingerprint that can be used to quickly diagnose problems. Mark Griswold, a radiology professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine and UH Case Medical Center, claims that the fingerprint of each tissue, each disease and each material inside the body can be compared with a different song. The researchers generate unique songs by simultaneously varying different parts of the input electromagnetic fields that probe the tissues. These variations make the received signal sensitive to four physical properties that vary from tissue to tissue. These differences become noticeable when applying pattern recognition programs using the same math in facial recognition software. The scientists believe that, as the technology advances, these results will determine whether tissue is healthy or not, how badly and by what it is diseased. An MRF will be much like a usual MRI For a patient, though quicker: when the scan is done, all of the patient’s songs would be compared with the songbook, which will provide doctors with a suite of diagnostic information. A full-body scan lasting just minutes would provide far more information and require no radiologist to interpret the data, making diagnostics cheap, compared to today’s scans. Researchers hope to reduce scanning time and continue to build the songbook, or library of fingerprints, over the next few years.
Via:sciencedaily.com