Quest for MRI Contrast Material

Magnetic resonance imaging, one of the most important medical imaging advances in disease detection, relies on the injection of contrast material to highlight specific tissue or to distinguish between healthy and diseased tissue. The materials used in this medical imaging procedure tend to have the drawback of being either simply constructed and managed within the body but offering low contract or more complex in construction, offering sharper medical imaging contrast but with less stability when injected.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has been collaborating with researchers at Florida State University and the University of Colorado at Boulder to create new medical imaging contrast materials that are highly magnetic, highly uniform (and thereby easier to manage) and very small. This combination of attributes will work together to create a very safe, very predictable, highly effective contract solution for use in medical imaging.

Laser X - New X-Ray Technology

Up until recently, the power source required to generate the appropriate strength laser beam for this application would be so enormous that it has been impractical to couple the use of lasers with X-Rays. However, researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder have developed a method to generate strong laser beams from a “table top” size power source, effectively making laser X-Ray technology a practical reality.

The research team used a laser beam to release atoms from argon, a highly stable chemical element. The resulting emission of X-Rays was too weak to be useful. The team then hurled the atoms back into the argon, causing a larger, more consistent stream of X-Rays of sufficient size to be useful to be emitted. This “boomerang” technique is now being manipulated to generate a highly regular, very strong source of X-Rays, coupled with laser beams.

The technique is not yet ready for application in the clinical setting. Further research is necessary to extend the technique into the hard X-Ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Once that task has been accomplished, the commercial laser X-Ray will follow.