Ding Xia1, Elan J. Grossman1,2,
Ke Zhang1, Jian Xu3, Kenneth I. Berger4,
Roberta M. Goldring4, Alexandra Stabile4, Larry
Daugherty5, Kellyanne McGorty1, Qun Chen1
1Center for Biomedical Imaging,
Department of Radiology, NYU School of Medicine, New York, United States; 2Department
of Physiology & Neuroscience, NYU School of Medicine, New York, United
States; 3Siemens Medical Solutions, Malvern, PA, United States; 4Department
of Medicine, NYU School of Medicine, New York, United States; 5Dept
of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States
When airway abnormalities are localized only to the distal airways clinical-pathologic correlation between patient illness and lung disease has been difficult to establish. The current study establishes differences in regional lung measurements for patients with known or suspected distal airway dysfunction from controls based on a tissue tracking MRI technique and optical flow method. Our results show that while additional improvement in both data acquisition and data analysis are still required to make the current approach robust, the potential of using tissue tracking MRI for early detection of distal airway appears to be significant.