image: Deuterium Metabolic Imaging (DMI) shows the abnormal sugar metabolism in the brain tumor of a patient. DMI detects the uptake of the sugar that is labeled with the nonradioactive deuterium (2H), and most importantly the processing (metabolism) of that sugar, using a regular MRI scanner. In this case, the patient simply drank a solution of the labeled sugar, dissolved in water. After waiting for about an hour, the patient enters the scanner, for the DMI scan, which takes about half an hour. DMI shows how the brain tumor is processing the sugar in a drastically different way than the rest of the brain. While standard MRI shows where the majority of the tumor is located, and its size, DMI now shows how the tumor tissue is processing its fuel differently. Changes in this metabolic information detected with DMI could indicate if a tumor is responding to a treatment or not. This is the topic of further research with DMI. DMI is simple to implement and robust, and therefore can become a widely available imaging method available in the clinic. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the Aug. 22, 2018, issue of Science Advances, published by AAAS. The paper, by H.M. De Feyter at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and colleagues was titled, "Deuterium metabolic imaging (DMI) for MRI-based 3D mapping of metabolism in vivo." view more
Credit: [Credit: Robin de Graaf & Henk De Feyter]