Using MRI to better detect Kidney diseases and treat Neurofibromatosis

Kevin Bennett, a biomedical engineer and physicist at ASU, does work that focuses on medical imaging, specifically the development and application of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). For the past five years, he's been using MRI to examine kidney structure and function and to detect early stages of kidney diseases.

He uses "magnetic nanoparticles and super-high field MRI to make very precise measurements of kidney structure and function." A kidney's susceptibility to disease can be determined by examining MRI images and determining the amount of nanoparticles that collect in a kidney's filtering nephrons (regulate the levels of water and soluble substances in the blood).

With an MRI, one can examine the functionality of nephrons in living organisms to assess risk of kidney disease, and can "help measure how well a donor kidney is going to function once it's transplanted."

With Bennett's expertise in MRI's, he is collaborating with Vinodh Narayanan, a pediatric neurologist, to find a drug that can reverse the effects of cognitive deficit symptoms in children with neurofibromatosis.

Neurofibromatosis is an incurable genetic disorder of the nervous system whose symptoms range from tumors to bone disorders. It's been proposed that the cognitive deficits in people with the condition are caused by a "certain kind of molecular transport in cells that is being blocked." Narayanan believes that the axonal transport is what is blocked by neurofibromatosis.

So, Bennett is aiding Narayanan by using MRI to view and record the effects of certain durgs targeted to increase the transport rates of cells. He's introducing manganese ions to cell transport because the ions can brighten MRI images. Manganese ions behave like calcium in cells, and they follow the same transport paths. When paired with MRI, the manganese allows the researchers to track the rate at which axons are transporting matter through cells.

To investigate this, the team will "just squirt" a bit of manganese into the nostrils and "monitor how fast manganese is moved from the nose into the olfactory bulb in the brain."

With this incredible research, the team has received an award of $275,00 from the NIH to continue the work!

I picked this particular article because I ultimately want to work with imaging machines in the medical field. To find promising research using medical imaging is exciting, and hopefully I would get the chance to practice some of these advances in the medical field someday!

To read the full article, go here:

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-medical-imaging-expertise-kidney-disease.html