Other organs

MagniXene™ dissolved in the blood through the pulmonary membranes does not lose its signal immediately. The signal survives with a mean life exceeding several seconds. This could potentially offer physicians a new general purpose contrast agent for imaging the heart, brain, or other highly perfused organs, or distinguishing cancer from other lesions.

Researchers are particularly intrigued by the potential of MagniXene™ in brain imaging. The intensity of the xenon signal in the brain would provide a direct measure of blood flow. The chemical shift structure could offer a spatial measure of the fractional distributions of the various tissue compartments. A technique known as Arterial Spin Labeling could encode “tags” on the xenon spins in order to measure their displacements over time intervals of several seconds, revealing transit times from one point in the arterial vasculature to any point in the brain.