High Resolution MR Angiography of Tumors Using Iron-Oxide Contrast Agent

Dmitri Artemov¹, Yoshinori Kato¹

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.