Young Ro Kim1, Dominique L. Jennings,
Thomas Benner, Seonjoo Kwon, Gyunggoo Cho2, Jeong Kon Kim, Chris
Farrar, Peter Caravan, Bruce Rosen, Greg Sorensen
1Athinoula A. Martinos
Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown,
MA, United States; 2Korea Basic Science Institute
Detecting invasive brain tumor regions and assessing their response to potential new therapies that target both tumor angiogenesis and tumor invasion is highly important but complicated by the lack of available methods for detecting the early growth. It has been recently shown that transvascular water exchange and the choice of imaging method and parameters can influence the accuracy and precision of blood volume measurements when using an intravascular T1 contrast agent.[1] In this work, using human tumor patients and clinically available contrast agent (i.e., Gd-DTPA), we demonstrated that a novel water exchange sensitive imaging technique can define new tumor border regions in the brain, otherwise undetectable with conventional imaging methods.