Abstract
SUMMARY: Sodium MR imaging has the potential to complement routine proton MR imaging examinations with the goal of improving diagnosis, disease characterization, and clinical monitoring in neurologic diseases. In the past, the utility and exploration of sodium MR imaging as a valuable clinical tool have been limited due to the extremely low MR signal, but with recent improvements in imaging techniques and hardware, sodium MR imaging is on the verge of becoming clinically realistic for conditions that include brain tumors, ischemic stroke, and epilepsy. In this review, we briefly describe the fundamental physics of sodium MR imaging tailored to the neuroradiologist, focusing on the basics necessary to understand factors that play into making sodium MR imaging feasible for clinical settings and describing current controversies in the field. We will also discuss the current state of the field and the potential future clinical uses of sodium MR imaging in the diagnosis, phenotyping, and therapeutic monitoring in neurologic diseases.
ABBREVIATIONS:
- ESC
- extracellular sodium concentration
- IDH
- isocitrate dehydrogenase
- ISC
- intracellular sodium concentration
- NHE1
- Na+/H+ exchanger isoform 1
- TSC
- total sodium concentration
Footnotes
This work was supported by American Cancer Society Research Scholar Grant (RSG-15-003-01-CCE), the UCLA SPORE in Brain Cancer grant (NIH/NCI 1P50CA211015-01A1), and the UCLA Department of Radiology Sodium Imaging Program.
Disclosures: Akifumi Hagiwara—RELATED: Grant: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Comments: 19K17150.
- © 2021 by American Journal of Neuroradiology
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