Our research seeks to establish Xenon MRI as a clinical tool for characterizing lung function. Xenon MRI allows us to directly visualize ventilation defects in patients with obstructive lung diseases like COPD, asthma, and cystic fibrosis. It offers information that can't be obtained from standard MRI and pulmonary function test.
Xenon MRI was recently approved by the FDA for clinical evaluation of lung ventilation. This represents a culmination of a huge amount of effort by the people in our field and it's an exciting opportunity to show how Xenon MRI can improve patient care and outcomes in pulmonary disease. Xenon MRI is still a relatively new family of techniques, and standardization is still an ongoing process.
This protocol distills the existing standards for Xenon ventilation MRI into a form that we hope will be useful to research in clinical sites who are trying to perform these scans for the first time. Common clinical readouts of lung function, like pulmonary function tests, only give a single number for the entire lung with no spatial information included. Xenon MRI can make regional assessments of several aspects of lung health and function, which we believe will be very useful in the clinic.
Only a few institutions are currently performing Xenon MRI, but we expect there will be many more sites soon considering the recent FDA approval. We hope that this Xenon ventilation MRI protocol will serve as a blueprint for new sites and help em to ramp up their Xenon MRI operations more quickly.
