Judy Alper1,2, Priti Balchandani1, Francois Fay1, and Hadrien Dyvorne1
1Translational and Molecular Imaging Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, United States, 2Department of Biomedical Engineering, City College of New York, New York, NY, United States
MRI has long been used as a detection tool for cells labeled
with superparamagnetic iron-oxide nanoparticles (SPIOs). Positive contrast
imaging of off-resonance SPIO signal provides benefits over negative contrast
methods and imaging the SPIOs at 7 Tesla (7T) allows for leveraging greater
off-resonance sensitivity for quantitative imaging of smaller cell populations.
In this study, we imaged a cell phantom containing SPIO labeled macrophages at
7T. We demonstrated the performance of frequency shift imaging (FSI), a new
acquisition technique, for characterizing the magnetic signature of SPIOs, as
compared to negative contrast methods.
