Mikayel Dabaghyan1, Isabel Maria Dregely2,
Iga Muradyan1,
1Department of Radiology, Brigham and
Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States; 2Department of
Physics, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, United States; 3Mirtech,
Inc, Brockton, MA, United States; 4Department of Environmental
Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States
In
this study we measured the regional partial pressure of oxygen in human
lungs, using hyperpolarized xenon, whose signal depends on the presence of
oxygens paramagnetic molecules. Similar studies have been conducted in the
past using HP helium. A number of images was acquired and the evolution of
the signal in each pixel was fit to a model describing its decay with time,
taking into account the longitudinal relaxation time (T1), which is affected
by the partial pressure of oxygen. Other parameters obtained from fitting the
data to the model were the oxygen uptake rate RO2 and the flip angle for each
pixel.