Xenon Surface Relaxivity: Potential Applications to Probing Lung Disease

¹Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA; ²College of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA; ³Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Hyperpolarized ¹²⁹Xe T₂, ADC, XTC and CSSR imaging techniques have been used to assess the pulmonary function, however, a drawback is that for any of these methods to be quantitative, a model of the lung is required. We believe that probing lung diseases by measuring xenon surface relaxivity in alveoli could offer unique advantages towards a model-free characterization. We demonstrated the probing of xenon surface relaxivity in phantoms and discuss potential application towards monitoring physiological changes in the alveoli surface properties, such as pulmonary fibrosis which have a large effect on the surface properties of alveoli.