Sodium Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Biomedical Applications

TL;DR

This paper reviews the biomedical applications of sodium MRI, highlighting its potential for tissue viability assessment and disease diagnosis, despite technical challenges in signal detection and hardware limitations.

Contribution

It provides an up-to-date overview of sodium MRI's applications across various tissues and discusses recent studies demonstrating its diagnostic potential.

Findings

Sodium MRI can assess tissue viability and cell function.

It has been applied in brain, breast, cartilage, muscle, and kidney.

Challenges include low sodium signal and hardware limitations.

Abstract

In this article, we present an up-to-date overview of the potential biomedical applications of sodium MRI in vivo. Sodium MRI is a subject of increasing interest in translational research as it can give some direct and quantitative biochemical information on the tissue viability, cell integrity and function, and therefore not only help the diagnosis but also the prognosis of diseases and treatment outcomes. It has already been applied in vivo in most of human tissues, such as brain for stroke or tumor detection and therapeutic response, in breast cancer, in articular cartilage, in muscle and in kidney, and it was shown in some studies that it could provide very useful new information not available through standard proton MRI. However, this technique is still very challenging due to the low detectable sodium signal in biological tissue with MRI and hardware/software limitations of the clinical scanners. The article is divided in three parts: (1) the role of sodium in biological tissues, (2) a short review on sodium magnetic resonance, and (3) a review of some studies on sodium MRI on different organs/diseases to date.