Scientists, professors, engineers, and mathematicians will start collaborating next month at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom to develop an improved electron spin resonance imaging device, the university said Wednesday.
The four-year project will be funded by the university to the tune of £850,000 ($1.6 million) and is the brainchild of Dr. Stephen Bingham, a research fellow in the physics department.
Dr. Bingham hopes to increase the speed and sensitivity of electron spin resonance imaging (ERI), also called electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) machines.
The increased speed and sensitivity could enable more precise and earlier detection of fatal illnesses like heart disease, stroke, diabetes, septic shock, and cancer, as well as a deeper understanding of them.
“The basic idea of ERI has been around for a couple decades,” said Dr. Bingham. “But there are lots of technical problems for instrumentation and getting proof-of-principle [theories] into a genuinely useful medical tool. We’re going to try a number of different ways for the signal to be detected and analyzed.”
Resonance Rationale
Electron spin resonance imaging is used to detect the chemical state of organs. The device acts like a magnetic resonance imaging scanner (MRI), but MRIs are for soft tissue—the organs themselves.
For a person who has just experienced a heart attack, for example, chemicals called superoxide radicals can be present and continue to damage the heart long after the attack has subsided. An MRI can see damage done to the actual heart walls, but an ERI machine can detect the actual quantity of the radicals.
This detection could help with the treatment of illnesses like heart disease that form from chemicals undetectable with an MRI, said Dr. Bingham.
ERI machines today are able to view either large samples with little sensitivity or precision, or smaller sized samples with better sensitivity, said Dr. Bingham.
Using the latest research in measurement techniques and data analysis, Dr. Bingham hopes to increase the sensitivity of ERI machines by 100 times or more to allow images to be recorded 10,000 times faster and with 10,000 times more information—meaning the sample size can be large with better sensitivity.
“Usually the work we’re looking to view with this device is done in vitro, in a test tube, for cell cultures,” said Dr. Simon Jackson, professor of molecular immunology at the Centre for Research in Biomedicine at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
“Now it’s being developed using different frequencies [of ERI],” he added. “If we can change those frequencies, it could allow for deeper penetration of tissue and larger sample sizes.”
Hit the Market
The device is estimated to take about two to three years to construct. Once it’s built, biomedical experts like Dr. Jackson and Dr. Philip James from the Wales Heart Research Institute at CardiffUniversity in the U.K. will help optimize the device.
“It’s a long way down the line,” Dr. Jackson acknowledged. But once the device and techniques are developed, the collaborators will be looking at biomedical manufacturers—like Brooker and Siemens—to produce the device.
Contact the writer:Editorial@RedHerring.com
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