Young Beom Kim1,2, Seung-Schik Yoo3, Ki Hyun Bae4, Tae Gwan Park4, HyunWook Park1
1Electrical Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea; 2In-Vivo-NMR Laboratory, Max-Planck-Institute for Neurological Research, Cologne, Germany; 3Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; 4Biological Sciences, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea
MR contrast agents (CAs) are important elements in the cellular MRI for labeling the cells to be visualized. Gadolinium (Gd) chelates are used for T1-weighted imaging and produce a signal increase, and superparamagnetic iron oxide particles (SPIOs) produce T2-weighted signal reduction. Although SPIOs provide more contrast than Gd-chelates, the negative contrast can be confused with signal voids from tissue inhomogeneity, edema, or local hemorrhage. We examined the utility of using combination of these two CAs in MRI for concurrent cell-labeling and dual contrast visualization.