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.
