Cornelius von Morze1,
Robert A. Bok2, Galen D. Reed1, Jan Henrik
Ardenkjaer-Larsen3, 4, John Kurhanewicz1,
Daniel B. Vigneron1
1Dept.
of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, UC San Francisco, San Francisco, CA,
United States; 2Dept. of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging,
University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States; 3GE
Healthcare, Frederiksberg, Denmark; 4Dept. of Electrical
Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark
We demonstrate simultaneous hyperpolarization and imaging of three non-toxic 13C-labeled perfusion MRI tracers with dissimilar molecular structures (urea, hydroxymethyl cyclopropane aka HP001, and t-butanol) and variable physiological characteristics. Due to varying bilayer permeability, these agents may be valuable in cancer imaging for isolating vascular and perfused tissue compartments, and separating vascular permeability and perfusion. Rapid dynamic imaging was by bSSFP with ramped flip angles and multi-band frequency encoding. These methods were applied to transgenic mice with prostate cancer. We modeled the data for absolute quantification of blood flow, and parameters were on the order of expected values.