Dmitri Artemov1, Yoshinori Kato1
1JHU ICMIC Program, Dept. of Radiology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
Many forms of anticancer therapy target tumor vasculature and monitoring their effect with noninvasive imaging is one of the most important problems in cancer imaging. MR angiography (MRA) allows direct visualization of the tumor vasculature however its spatial resolution is limited by the method and only relatively large mature blood vessels can be imaged using current techniques. We propose to use SPIO-based blood pool contrast agents for susceptibility contrast enhanced MRA. These agents remain intravascular in the leaky tumor vasculature and provide improved visualization of small blood vessels due to the blooming effect in T2* weighted MR images.