Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a gold standard tool for capturing crisp, detailed pictures without radiation, to diagnose serious conditions like cancer and epilepsy.
But to Dan Ma, PhD, associate professor of neurosurgery and associate professor in biomedical engineering, it’s still too imprecise.
She compares it to checking for a fever by touching someone’s forehead: useful, but subjective. “When radiologists read clinical MRI images, they will say a lesion is brighter or darker compared to another area,” Ma said. “It’s a very qualitative evaluation. It’s not giving you an absolute value measuring tissue property.”
In addition, results can differ depending on the scanner or even the day. “There’s no standard way of showing an image,” Ma said. “Even at the same scanner, on a different day, the image contrast may be a little bit different.”
In 2013, while still a PhD student at Case Western Reserve University, Ma introduced a better solution: MR fingerprinting. Like using a thermometer instead of a hand, this method assigns objective numbers to tissue properties. And because of the way the images are gathered, the scans are faster (good news for anyone who’s endured the claustrophobia of lying inside an MRI machine for half an hour).