Application of kt-BLAST acceleration to reduce cardiac MR imaging time in healthy and infarcted mice

Effect of coating thickness of iron oxide nanoparticles on their relaxivity in the MRI

OBJECTIVES

Iron oxide nanoparticles have found prevalent applications in various fields including drug delivery, cell separation and as contrast agents. Super paramagnetic iron oxide (SPIO) nanoparticles allow researchers and clinicians to enhance the tissue contrast of an area of interest by increasing the relaxation rate of water. In this study, we evaluate the dependency of hydrodynamic size of iron oxide nanoparticles coated with Polyethylene glycol (PEG) on their relativities with 3 Tesla clinical MRI.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

We used three groups of nanoparticles with nominal sizes 20, 50 and 100 nm with a core size of 8.86 nm, 8.69 nm and 10.4 nm that they were covered with PEG 300 and 600 Da. A clinical magnetic resonance scanner determines the T1 and T2 relaxation times for various concentrations of PEG-coated nanoparticles.

RESULTS

The size measurement by photon correlation spectroscopy showed the hydrodynamic sizes of MNPs with nominal 20, 50 and 100 nm with 70, 82 and 116 nm for particles with PEG 600 coating and 74, 93 and 100 nm for particles with PEG 300 coating, respectively. We foud that the relaxivity decreased with increasing overall particle size (via coating thickness). Magnetic resonance imaging showed that by increasing the size of the nanoparticles, r2/r1 increases linearly.

CONCLUSION

According to the data obtained from this study it can be concluded that increments in coating thickness have more influence on relaxivities compared to the changes in core size of magnetic nanoparticles.

Small animal cardiovascular MR imaging and spectroscopy

The use of MR imaging and spectroscopy for studying cardiovascular disease processes in small animals has increased tremendously over the past decade. This is the result of the remarkable advances in MR technologies and the increased availability of genetically modified mice. MR techniques provide a window on the entire timeline of cardiovascular disease development, ranging from subtle early changes in myocardial metabolism that often mark disease onset to severe myocardial dysfunction associated with end-stage heart failure. MR imaging and spectroscopy techniques play an important role in basic cardiovascular research and in cardiovascular disease diagnosis and therapy follow-up. This is due to the broad range of functional, structural and metabolic parameters that can be quantified by MR under in vivo conditions non-invasively. This review describes the spectrum of MR techniques that are employed in small animal cardiovascular disease research and how the technological challenges resulting from the small dimensions of heart and blood vessels as well as high heart and respiratory rates, particularly in mice, are tackled.