Department of Electronic Science, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Plasma and Magnetic Resonance, State Key Laboratory for Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China.
NMR Biomed. 2013 Dec;26(12):1663-71. doi: 10.1002/nbm.3000. Epub 2013 Jul 15.
Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is a promising therapeutic target in obesity studies. Recently, MRI has been proposed for the mapping of BAT. However, because of the limitation of spatial resolution, similar to the existing positron emission tomography and computed tomography techniques for BAT detection, it fails to distinguish BAT cells when they are mixed with other cells. In this work, a new MRI method is proposed, combining intermolecular double-quantum coherence and the chemical shift-encoded Dixon method. Its contrast depends on the water to fat ratio at the cellular scale, which is smaller than the imaging voxel size. The feasibility of this MRI method was shown with computer simulations and phantoms, and preliminary imaging of BAT of rats at 7 T. Both computer simulations and experimental results are consistent with theoretical predictions. The method provides a novel contrast mechanism and can map BAT distribution exclusively. In particular, a mixture of BAT cells and white adipose tissue cells was detected in an older rat, which was undetectable by other noninvasive methods. This method may be applicable to a wide range of uses in BAT-related studies, including the formation and variation of BAT.
棕色脂肪组织（BAT）是肥胖研究中很有前途的治疗靶点。最近，有人提出 MRI 可用于 BAT 的定位。然而，由于空间分辨率的限制，与现有的正电子发射断层扫描和计算机断层扫描技术一样，当 BAT 细胞与其他细胞混合时，它无法将其区分开来。在这项工作中，提出了一种新的 MRI 方法，将分子间双量子相干与化学位移编码 Dixon 方法相结合。它的对比度取决于细胞尺度上水与脂肪的比例，该比例小于成像体素尺寸。通过计算机模拟和体模证明了这种 MRI 方法的可行性，并在 7T 下对大鼠的 BAT 进行了初步成像。计算机模拟和实验结果都与理论预测一致。该方法提供了一种新的对比机制，可以专门绘制 BAT 分布。特别是，在一只老年大鼠中检测到 BAT 细胞与白色脂肪组织细胞的混合物，这是其他非侵入性方法无法检测到的。这种方法可能适用于与 BAT 相关的广泛研究，包括 BAT 的形成和变化。
