MPI-ANGIO · Magnetic Particle Imaging for Safe Angiography

Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) is a new imaging modality with the ideal image contrast for angiography that uses completely different hardware from X-ray, CT, or MRI. MPI is now at an exciting stage of development similar to where MRI was in the early 1980s. Currently, there are no commercially available MPI scanners. Only a handful of prototype small animal MPI scanners have been constructed worldwide in research environments. Yet, there is already great promise for diagnostic application of MPI for the three top mortality diseases in the world: cardiovascular disease (25% of all deaths), cancer (23%), and stroke (5%). MPI angiography shows great promise as a noninvasive, non-ionizing replacement for the millions of high-risk iodinated contrast studies performed annually. The contrast agent used in MPI, Super-Paramagnetic Iron Oxide (SPIO) nanoparticles, has been found to be extremely safe, even for chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients whose kidneys cannot safely excrete iodine contrast agents of X-ray and CT angiography. Indeed, SPIOs are now EU approved to treat anemia in CKD patients. With this proposal, Dr. Saritas will begin development of Turkey’s first MPI laboratory, and transfer her MPI expertise acquired at University of California, Berkeley to the scientific community in Europe. MPI-ANGIO project proposes several innovations in MPI hardware, contrast agent and pulse sequences to improve MPI’s spatial and temporal resolutions, now ~2 mm pixels and 7-minute scan time, to a much sharper 300-micron resolution at 2-4 frames/second.