This discovery opens the door to a novel way of incorporating MRI into multisite clinical trials including diabetes and other pancreatic illnesses.
It’s predicted that adding MRI to the investigative toolset for large, multisite research will lead to better diagnosis and treatment of disorders affecting the pancreas, as well as better monitoring and understanding of disease development.
An MRI Methodology For Multisite Pancreatic Research
A multisite survey led by scientists from the Vanderbilt Diabetes Research and Training Center (DRTC) at Vanderbilt University Clinic has shown that quantifiable magnetic resonance (MRI) of the pancreatic is repeatable once governed and standardized, even once utilizing distinct MRI software and hardware at various based on geography places.
“We know MRI can have important applications in future diabetes research and ultimately clinical management of the disease so our developing, testing, and then sharing a standardized pancreatic imaging protocol for MRI is a critical step to advance this field.”
“MRI is invaluable for diagnosing and monitoring many pancreatic disorders including chronic and acute pancreatitis, non-alcoholic fatty pancreas disease and pancreatic cancer,” said VUMC site investigator Daniel Moore, Ph.D., MD, assistant professor of Pediatrics and Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology.
“Also, in recent studies, MRI has been used to better understand the progression of type 1 and type 2 diabetes, as evidenced by changes in pancreas size.
With the help of this new method, it is easy to detect any variation in the size said one of the experts. For a patient as well as an expert it is necessary to know the size of the pancreas as it can help find a number of issues and address them accurately.
The difficulty to do precise, multisite examinations of the pancreatic utilizing MRI scanning owing to the high variety of the pictures generated by various MRI hardware or software is a key restriction in the utilization of MRI for researching the pancreatic.
Furthermore, whereas the multisite standardization has aided MRI visualization of the central nervous system and solid tumors, the adrenal glands are difficult to image due to its place depth inside the stomach, irregular boundaries, and the possibility of artifacts or characteristics appearing in the imaging which are not truly prevalent in the bloodstream.
A “phantom,” a cautiously calibrated artifact that is digitized to assess the achievement of an optical instrument, was intended and organized the MRI image analyses for the research by John Virostko, an investigator in MAP-T1D and aide teacher of Diagnostic Medicine in the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin.
Virostko was previously at the Vanderbilt University Institute of Image Science, where he pioneered pancreatic MRI investigations in type 1 diabetes and started working with Moore.
“We were able to show that by using a standardized MRI image acquisition and processing protocol, quantitative MRI of the pancreas performed at multiple locations can be very accurately reproduced,” said Virostko. “Because of this, scientists throughout the world can follow this same protocol to incorporate MRI into multisite clinical trials comparing pancreas imaging measures and metabolic state in individuals with type 1 or type 2 diabetes,” he said.
“This has positive implications for scientists investigating other diseases affecting the pancreas, and we’re sharing this protocol universally to support future research,” said Moore. “We hope scientists applying imaging to the pancreas will adopt a standardized protocol that will ultimately enable everyone to combine data from diverse studies and thereby accelerate progress.”
Scientists from VUMC, the University of Texas at Austin, the Barbara Davis Center for Diabetes at the University of Colorado, the University of Chicago, and St. Vincent’s Medical Research Institute at the University of Melbourne collaborated on this study.
