MRI can be used to study stroke

Robert Knight and James Ewing are both adjunct faculty members in the Department of Physics. They perform their research in the Department of Neurology at Henry Ford Hospital, where they supervise graduate students in the Biomedical Sciences: Medical Physics PhD program. In the June issue of the journal NMR in Biomedicine, Ewing and Knight are coauthors on the paper “MRI and Quantitative Autoradiographic Studies Following Bolus Injections of Unlabeled and C-14-Labeled Gadolinium-Diethylenetriaminepentaacetic Acid in a Rat Model of Stroke Yield Similar Distribution Volumes and Blood-to-Brain Influx Rate Constants” (Volume 24, Pages 547-558). Another coauthor was former OU graduate student Kishor Karki, who won OU’s 2010 Outstanding Dissertation Award. The first paragraph of the paper explains the goals of the study (references removed):

“The blood–brain barrier (BBB) is a major part of the neurovascular unit, and is often breached following brain injuries, such as stroke. It is therefore important to image and evaluate BBB function following brain injury and to repeat such measurements to not only stage the lesion but also to evaluate the efficacy of treatment. Dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) imaging of the blood–brain distribution of magnetic resonance contrast agents (MRCAs) that do not permeate the normal BBB has the potential to do this, and has the advantage of being minimally invasive. This raises the question of the accuracy of MRI estimates of MRCA concentration in blood and brain and of the pathophysiological parameters that can be derived from them, e.g. the blood-to-brain influx rate constant (Ki) and the volume of circulating blood in the microvasculature.”