NMR in biomedicine
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This study aimed to evaluate whether MR metabolic profiling can be used for prediction of long-term survival and monitoring of treatment response in locally advanced breast cancer patients during neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC). ⋯ Our results demonstrate that HR MAS MR metabolic profiles consisting of important metabolic characteristics of breast cancer tumors could potentially assist the classification and prediction of long-term survival in locally advanced breast cancer patients, in addition to being used as an adjunct for evaluation of treatment response to NAC.
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The potential of MRI to provide quantitative measures of neuromuscular pathology for use in therapeutic trials is being increasingly recognised. Magnetisation transfer (MT) imaging shows particular promise in this context, being sensitive to pathological changes, particularly in skeletal muscle, where measurements correlate with clinically measured muscle strength. Radiofrequency (RF) transmit field (B(1)) inhomogeneities can be particularly problematic in measurements of the MT ratio (MTR) and may obscure genuine muscle MTR changes caused by disease. ⋯ The correction scheme is evaluated practically in MTR imaging of the lower limbs of 28 healthy individuals and in two groups of patients with representative neuromuscular diseases: Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease type 1A and inclusion body myositis. The correction scheme was observed to reduce both the within-subject and between-subject variability in the calf and thigh muscles of healthy subjects and patient groups in histogram- and region-of-interest-based approaches. This method of correcting for RF inhomogeneity effects in MTR maps using B(1) data may markedly improve the sensitivity of MTR mapping indices as measures of pathology in skeletal muscle.