Developments in Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Magnetic resonance is a well established imaging technique that can still profit from contributions from physicists, both in terms of allowing its full exploitation in applicative contexts and in terms of improving its performances and from chemists, in terms of development of tracers.
This project plans to exploit the experience acquired by the participants on several physical and chemical aspects to the improvement of the impact of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on medical applications.
In particular, two are the lines of research that we intend to pursue:
- develop tools for the use of MRI in the assessment of the effectiveness of therapies, i.e. in the stadiation of tumors, in particular rectal cancer. We plan to use the expertise of data analysis, specifically machine learning, developed in high energy experiments to enhance the information extracted from images, in particular in the segmentation of the image.
- improve the quality of MRI with fluorine (19F) finalized to the determination of the biodistribution of tracers.
In this line, we plan to exploit the competences in data analysis of the components of the group to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio of the 19F images that suffer from a low signal and to exploit the competences in chemistry to develop innovative tracers for a particular clinical case, the enhancement of the effectiveness of neutron and/or proton therapy by enriching the tumor target with fluorinated and borated compounds.