Pre-clinical MRI Applications
MRI is characterized by the ability to monitor in vivo biological variables noninvasively, and the ability to serially track the progression of a disease or intervention in the same living animal, thus improving a study's biological and translational relevance.
Pre-clinical MRI applications include brain and organ imaging, tumour assessment, disease progression assessment, and functional imaging. Other potential research applications include investigating new contrast mechanisms and agents, monitoring gene expression, analyzing protein interactions, and determining pharmacokinetics.
Morphological imaging is important for distinguishing differences in anatomy due to disease progression or phenotype. MRI performs very well in measuring anatomical detail due to excellent image contrast between individual soft tissue types.
The current frontier in preclinical MRI research is "molecular imaging", which aims to noninvasively detect events on the cellular and sub-cellular level. This approach typically involves attaching an MRI-visible contrast agent to a cell or nanoparticle that would otherwise be undetectable under MRI. In this way, therapeutic agents such as drugs can be labelled in order to monitor the distribution and pharmacokinetics of the agent following injection.