Maolin Qiu1,
Ramachandran Ramani2, Robert Todd Constable3
1Diagnostic
Radiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, United States; 2Anesthesiology,
Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, United States; 3Diagnostic
Radiology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States
Direct Fluorine-19 imaging of anesthesia induced by Sevoflurane will provide important information about the pharmacokinetics of inhalational agents. Together with the pharmacology studies it may provide the whole picture of the neuronal mechanisms of general anesthesia. The extremely low cortical concentrations at clinically-relevant levels make in-vivo 19F imaging of cortical distributions in humans very challenging. With the aid of recent advances in imaging, we have successfully demonstrated in-vivo detecting regional Sevoflurane with a 1H/19F dual-tuned CP head coil during anesthesia at 0.5MAC. Our results not only support the observations from previous animal studies, but have provided new insight into the drug delivery of this agent.