Researchers that developed a new imaging technique designed to create full 3D visualizations of blood vessels, shared their progress in Nature Methods.[1]

“Usually, if you want to gather data on blood vessels in a given tissue and combine it with all of its surrounding context like the structure and the types of cells growing there, you have to re-label the tissue several times, acquire multiple images and piece together the complementary information,” corresponding author Arvind Pathak, PhD, professor of radiology, biomedical and electrical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a prepared statement. “This can be an expensive and time-consuming process that risks destroying the tissue’s architecture, precluding our ability to use the combined information in novel ways.”

The team’s new approach, which they’ve called VascuViz, is designed to make a patient’s blood vessels visible with a variety of different imaging modalities. Instead of only working with only MRI scans or CT scans, for instance, VascuViz helps the blood vessels remain visible at all times.

The team’s work is centered on the combination of a CT contrast agent, BriteVu, and an MRI contrast agent, Galbumin-Rhodamine. This compound makes even tiny details of a patient’s blood vessels visible on multiple modalities. These enhanced images can, in theory, help clinicians learn more about the presence of different blood flow abnormalities and track other changes going on inside the patient’s body.