Modern simulations could improve MRIs

An illustration based on simulations by Rice engineers shows a gadolinium ion ( blue ) in water (red and white), with inner-sphere water - the water most affected by the gadolinium - highlighted. The researchers' models of gadolinium in water show there's room for improvement in compounds used as contrast agents in clinical magnetic resonance imaging. Illustration by Arjun Valiya Parambathu - Rice engineers find more efficient models to analyze contrast agents that find disease Gadolinium -based contrast agents , the gold standard in  magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to determine the health of a patient, can be improved, according to Rice University engineers who are refining models they first used to enhance oil and gas recovery. The team led by Dilip Asthagiri and Philip Singer of the George R. Brown School of Engineering had studied how nuclear magnetic resonance tools, commonly used in the oil industry to characterize deposits underground, could be optimized through molecular dynamics simulations. "We addressed a lot of fundamental scientific questions there, and we wondered if there were other ways we could use these simulations," Asthagiri said. "There are roughly 100 million MRIs taken worldwide every year, and about 40% of them use gadolinium-based contrast agents, but the way they model MRI response to these agents hasn't changed significantly since the 1980s," Singer said. "We thought it would be a good test bed for our ideas." The results of their research appear in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.