Siemens Healthcare and Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) announced yesterday a research partnership to further develop a quantitative imaging method known as Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF). It quantitatively analyzes tissue to spot individual disease tissues earlier and faster.

MR images are generally qualitatively evaluated, which means the properties of the pathology are determined by observing differences in contrast between tissues rather than through measurements of individual tissue properties.

There are quantitative methods to measure diffusion, fat/iron deposits, perfusion or relaxation times, but it's a time-consuming process and the results vary based on the scanner and user. However, MRF is potentially associated with a low rate of variation across a large number of exams, and also across different scanners and institutions.
Instead of generating conventional clinical images, MRF gathers tissue information based on the signal evolution from each voxel. Signal evolutions are like the "fingerprints" of tissue properties — similar to the identification of human fingerprints in forensics.

Just as those fingerprints have to be evaluated by comparing them with a file containing all known fingerprints, the signal evolutions are compared to a database or "dictionary" to find the entry that best represents the acquired signal evolution of each voxel.

In forensics, the fingerprints reveal features to identify the person, such as name, height, weight, eye color and date of birth. With MRF, the fingerprint in the dictionary points to the MR-related identification feature of the associated tissue including T1, T2, relative spin density and diffusion.

The CWRU research team have already successfully tested it with brain and prostate tumor patients, breast cancer patients with liver metastases, and it has also been used in cardiac exams and with patients with multiple sclerosis. The team is working on expanding the technology to cover additional fields of application.

In September 2015, a Work-in-Progress (WIP) MRF package for select Siemens scanners was launched. The packages have been tested since January 2016 at the University Hospital Essen in Germany and the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, and have been shown to be successful.

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