NON INVASIVE METHOD TO EVALUATE BRAIN HEAT FLOW BY MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING

BACKGROUND Temperature monitoring is currently used in different therapies (e.g. cancer, thermal ablation, brain cooling in neonatal hypoxia and stroke). There are no methods to measure non invasively brain heat flow. Policlinico researchers developed a model and an alghorithm to measure temperature and heat flow in a completely non-invasive manner and to represent it pictorially. This innovative method can be incorporated in MRI machines to estimate heat flow, making in-vivo heat monitoring feasible for research and diagnostic or therapeutic purposes.

TECHNOLOGY This innovative method to evaluate brain heat flows combines different non-invasive monitoring techniques in order to estimate parameters useful for diagnostic purposes. Different MRI acquisition modalities are used. First, a structural 3D-T1 image is acquired to estimate the white matter, grey matter and cerebro-spinal fluid (CSF) distribution. Then, a MRS (and/or a MR temperature sensitive sequence) acquisition is performed, in the selected area of interest or in the whole brain. The heat flow is calculated using the temperature of the considered voxels and of those adjacent to the first, and the relative thermal conductivity