Periodic Reporting for period 1 - VascularID (MRI-based ID of the Vasculature across the Heart-Brain Axis)
Période du rapport: 2023-08-01 au 2026-01-31
Impairment of the smallest blood vessels, the microvasculature, is a hallmark of many of today’s most burdening diseases, including forms of ischemic heart disease, stroke, and dementia. It is also one of the most promising candidates to explain the link between cardiovascular and brain disease (so-called heart-brain axis). However, only histology provides comprehensive assessment of the microvasculature, and is rarely available in vivo as it requires invasive biopsy. The lack of early, non-invasive markers limits our pathophysiological understanding and crucially affects treatment success, as preventive intervention is the only successful clinical management strategy available.
With a major leap in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) physics, VascularID will address this need by providing a fully non-invasive toolset for the quantitative assessment of cardiac and cerebral microvasculature. This non-invasive biopsy exploits microscopic magnetic fields around the vessels to obtain structural information about the microvasculature. It is contrast-free and resilient against field inhomogeneities and can, for the first time, be used in both the heart and the brain. Combined with a new generation of non-contrast perfusion MRI, VascularID will provide comprehensive functional and structural information.Impairment of the smallest blood vessels, the microvasculature, is a hallmark of many of today’s most burdening diseases, including forms of ischemic heart disease, stroke, and dementia. It is also one of the most promising candidates to explain the link between cardiovascular and brain disease (so-called heart-brain axis). However, only histology provides comprehensive assessment of the microvasculature, and is rarely available in vivo as it requires invasive biopsy. The lack of early, non-invasive markers limits our pathophysiological understanding and crucially affects treatment success, as preventive intervention is the only successful clinical management strategy available.
With a major leap in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) physics, VascularID will address this need by providing a fully non-invasive toolset for the quantitative assessment of cardiac and cerebral microvasculature. This non-invasive biopsy exploits microscopic magnetic fields around the vessels to obtain structural information about the microvasculature. It is contrast-free and resilient against field inhomogeneities and can, for the first time, be used in both the heart and the brain. Combined with a new generation of non-contrast perfusion MRI, VascularID will provide comprehensive functional and structural information. We will comprehensively evaluate the sensitivity and robustness of our tools in test objects, pre-clinical studies and in vivo. We hope that in clinical use these tools provide the missing key to the vascular underpinnings of diseases that form the major burden to our health care system in the years to come.
With a major leap in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) physics, VascularID will address this need by providing a fully non-invasive toolset for the quantitative assessment of cardiac and cerebral microvasculature. This non-invasive biopsy exploits microscopic magnetic fields around the vessels to obtain structural information about the microvasculature. It is contrast-free and resilient against field inhomogeneities and can, for the first time, be used in both the heart and the brain. Combined with a new generation of non-contrast perfusion MRI, VascularID will provide comprehensive functional and structural information.Impairment of the smallest blood vessels, the microvasculature, is a hallmark of many of today’s most burdening diseases, including forms of ischemic heart disease, stroke, and dementia. It is also one of the most promising candidates to explain the link between cardiovascular and brain disease (so-called heart-brain axis). However, only histology provides comprehensive assessment of the microvasculature, and is rarely available in vivo as it requires invasive biopsy. The lack of early, non-invasive markers limits our pathophysiological understanding and crucially affects treatment success, as preventive intervention is the only successful clinical management strategy available.
With a major leap in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) physics, VascularID will address this need by providing a fully non-invasive toolset for the quantitative assessment of cardiac and cerebral microvasculature. This non-invasive biopsy exploits microscopic magnetic fields around the vessels to obtain structural information about the microvasculature. It is contrast-free and resilient against field inhomogeneities and can, for the first time, be used in both the heart and the brain. Combined with a new generation of non-contrast perfusion MRI, VascularID will provide comprehensive functional and structural information. We will comprehensively evaluate the sensitivity and robustness of our tools in test objects, pre-clinical studies and in vivo. We hope that in clinical use these tools provide the missing key to the vascular underpinnings of diseases that form the major burden to our health care system in the years to come.
So far during the project, we have developed a new test platform, so-called imaging phantoms, to study, develop, and optimize MRI methods that are sensitive to microscopic magnetic fields. We used this to conclusively demonstrate the microstructural sensitivity of our MRI methods in early tests. We have also developed a method to assess blood flow into the heart without contrast agents that is much more robust to noise than existing methods. In existing methods, the background signal was highly variable due to small differences in the timing of each heartbeat. We introduced a technology that compensates for this by ensuring the background signal is in the same state for each measurement. This greatly reduces the variability of contrast-agent-free perfusion measurements and yields much cleaner maps showing the quantitative assessment of blood flow.
Our newly developed non-contrast perfusion measurements can potentially unlock blood flow measurements in cases where contrast agents are not an option. Clinical studies now need to evaluate if the improved measurement quality is sufficient to provide a non-contrast alternative to conventional contrast-agent based perfusion measurements in some patients. If these tests are positive contrast-agent-free blood flow measurement can fill an important gap in clinical use.