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Ventilation defect percent (VDP) measured in asthmatics with hyperpolarized helium-3 MRI was more strongly associated with ED visits and hospitalizations due to asthma exacerbation than were conventional biomarkers of lung function and inflammation.

A previous study demonstrated the feasibility of using 3D radial ultrashort echo time (UTE) oxygen-enhanced MRI (UTE OE-MRI) for functional imaging of healthy human lungs. The repeatability of quantitative measures from UTE OE-MRI needs to be established prior to its application in clinical research.To evaluate repeatability of obstructive patterns in asthma and cystic fibrosis (CF) with UTE OE-MRI with isotropic spatial resolution and full chest coverage.Volunteer and patient repeatability.Eighteen human subjects (five asthma, six CF, and seven normal subjects).Respiratory-gated free-breathing 3D radial UTE (80 μs) sequence at 1.5T.Two 3D radial UTE volumes were acquired sequentially under normoxic and hyperoxic conditions. A subset of subjects underwent repeat acquisitions on either the same day or ≤15 days apart. Asthma and CF subjects also underwent spirometry. A workflow including deformable registration and retrospective lung density correction was used to compute 3D isotropic percent signal enhancement (PSE) maps. Median PSE (MPSE) and ventilation defect percent (VDP) of the lung were measured from the PSE map.The relations between MPSE, VDP, and spirometric measures were assessed using Spearman correlations. The test-retest repeatability was evaluated using Bland-Altman analysis and intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC).Ventilation measures in normal subjects (MPSE = 8.0%, VDP = 3.3%) were significantly different from those in asthma (MPSE = 6.0%, P = 0.042; VDP = 21.7%, P = 0.018) and CF group (MPSE = 4.5%, P = 0.0006; VDP = 27.2%, P = 0.002). MPSE correlated significantly with forced expiratory lung volume in 1 second percent predicted (ρ = 0.72, P = 0.017). The ICC of the test-retest VDP and MPSE were both ≥0.90. In all subject groups, an anterior/posterior gradient was observed with higher MPSE and lower VDP in the posterior compared to anterior regions (P ≤ 0.0021 for all comparisons).3D radial UTE OE-MRI supports quantitative differentiation of diseased vs. healthy lungs using either whole lung VDP or MPSE with excellent test-retest repeatability.2 Technical Efficacy: Stage 1 J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2018;47:1287-1297.

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES: To compare the performance of a semi-automated ventilation defect segmentation approach, adaptive K-means, with manual segmentation of hyperpolarized helium-3 magnetic resonance imaging (HP (3)He MRI) in subjects with exercise-induced bronchoconstriction (EIB). MATERIALS AND METHODS: Six EIB subjects underwent HP (3)He MRI and spirometry tests at baseline, post-exercise, and recovery over two separate visits. Ventilation defects were analyzed by two methods. First, two independent readers manually segmented ventilation defects. Second, defects were quantified by an adaptive K-means method that corrected for coil sensitivity, applied a vesselness filter to estimate pulmonary vasculature and segmented defects adaptively based on the overall low-intensity signals in the lungs. These two methods were then compared in four aspects: 1) ventilation defect percent (VDP) measurements, 2) correlation between spirometric measures and measured VDP, 3) regional VDP variations pre- and post-exercise challenge and 4) Dice coefficient for spatial agreement. RESULTS: The adaptive K-means method was ~ 5 times faster and the measured VDP bias was under 2%. The correlation between predicted forced expiratory volume in 1 second over forced vital capacity and VDP measured by adaptive K-means (ρ = −0.64, p < 0.0001) and by the manual method (ρ = −0.63, p < 0.0001) yielded almost identical 95% confidence intervals. Neither method of measuring VDP indicated apical/basal or anterior dependence in this small study cohort. CONCLUSION: Compared to the manual method, the adaptive K-means method provided faster, reproducible, comparable measures of VDP in EIB and may be applied to a variety of lung diseases.

How the left ventricle remodels in response to a high-volume stimulus is important in evaluating the endurance athlete's heart. Marathoners and patients with isolated, moderate chronic compensated mitral regurgitation (MR) represent physiologic and pathologic forms of eccentric left ventricular (LV) remodeling in response to intermittent and chronic volume overload, respectively. Thus, in this study, magnetic resonance imaging with tissue tagging and 3-dimensional data analysis at rest were performed in 19 marathoners (mean age 39 ± 10 years, 47% women), 17 patients with isolated MR without coronary artery disease or medical therapy (mean age 46 ± 5 years, 53% women), and 24 controls (mean age 45 ± 8 years, 50% women). Marathoners and patients with MR had approximately 35% greater LV end-diastolic volume indexes, approximately 50% greater end-systolic volume indexes, and approximately 34% greater LV stroke volume indexes (p0.0001) compared to controls. However, marathoners' hearts had increased long-axis length, while those of patients with MR did not differ from the hearts of controls. The hearts of patients with MR had greater LV global and apex sphericity compared to those of marathoners and controls (p0.0001). Marathoners had normal LV mass/volume ratios and wall thicknesses, whereas these were significantly decreased in the MR group. In marathoners, the baseline LV work rate was similar to that in controls and higher in patients with MR compared to controls. In conclusion, marathoners' hearts achieve elevated stroke volume at rest with adherence to an elliptical shape defined by 3-dimensional geometry and mass/volume ratio. Thus, a comprehensive evaluation of LV geometry and mass/volume ratio may be important in the evaluation of the athlete's heart.

We used erythrocytes as the model tissue to evaluate an optimal solution for the extraction of intracellular metabolites and time-dependent variation of the metabolome in living cells. Projection to latent structure (PLS) of the GC/MS and LC/MS data suggested that the most efficient solution for the extraction of metabolites from wet erythrocytes (50 mg) could be a methanol-chloroform-water mixture (950 microL, 700:200:50, v/v/v). PLS-discriminant analysis (DA) clearly profiled a time-dependent alternation of metabolic phenotype of erythrocytes. Identification of the metabolites showed that the process was characterized by accumulating of metabolic products and depleting of nutritious substances in erythrocytes during incubation.