Medical Physics Seminar – Monday, September 27, 2010
Simultaneous Proton and Hyperpolarized Carbon-13 Imaging
Eric Peterson (student of Dr. Sean Fain)
Research Assistant, Department of Medical Physics, UW-School of Medicine & Public Health, Madison, WI USA
Functional imaging, the ability to view metabolism noninvasively in vivo, is becoming an important tool in both research and the clinic. Recently, the process of hyperpolarizing carbon-13 compounds for MR imaging was developed, which allows for high signal from polarized metabolites and allows for metabolic imaging without ionizing radiation. This talk will focus on the optimization of hyperpolarized carbon-13 for imaging, specifically the simultaneous acquisition of both structure (proton) and function (carbon-13) simultaneously. This method provides inherently registered structure and function images with the possibility for monitoring local tissue properties and motion simultaneous to the functional imaging.