Bastiaan Driehuys1,2,
Zackary I. Cleveland2,3, John Nouls1,2, S. Sivaram
Kaushik2,4, Gary P. Cofer2, Santiago Jimenez-Martinez1,
Jan Wolber5, Monica Kraft6, H. Page McAdams1
1Department of
Radiology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA; 2Center for in vivo
Microscopy, Duke University; 3Department of Radiology, Duke
University, Durham, NC, USA; 4Biomedical
Engineering, Duke University; 5GE Healthcare; 6Pulmonary
and Critical Care Medicine, Duke University
As part of a recently completed phase I clinical trial, 44 subjects underwent hyperpolarized (HP) 129Xe ventilation imaging. Here we report quantitative analysis of these 129Xe ventilation images using a simple reader-based scoring system. We show that xenon ventilation scores correlate significantly with pulmonary function tests and readily separate subjects with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) from age-matched controls. Moreover, in the healthy subject population, we show that defects scores correlate significantly with age, a finding that may suggest that 129Xe, with its high resistance to flow, is more sensitive to minor obstruction than 3He.