Abstract #1668

Yu J, Kadlecek S, Ishii M, MacDuffie Woodburn J, Emami K, Vahdat V, Rizi R, Shrager J, Zhu J, Fischer M, Friscia M

Emphysema is a devastating disease associated with significant morbidities and mortalities. The early detection of emphysema is of fundamental importance to the diagnosis and treatment of this disease. In this work, we show that regional measures of fractional ventilation using hyperpolarized helium-3 MRI can detect early forms of emphysema and that it is a sensitive marker of disease progression. A comparison between functional MRI parameters and histology is presented as well.