Quantum Sensing for advancing in quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging techniques

Quantum technologies such as quantum sensing are expected to revolutionize medical diagnosis. Quantum sensors will serve applications ranging from thermometry to diagnostic imaging with sub-micrometer resolutions [1-6]. Traditional non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques are limited to millimeter-scale spatial resolution, which falls short in capturing relevant details of tissue microstructure and disease processes that operate at molecular and microstructural scales governed by quantum physics. To address this, we leverage the intrinsic nuclear spins of biological molecules, such as water protons, as quantum sensors to quantitatively characterize the underlying microstructure efficiently and with high precision using magnetic resonance techniques [1,3,5]. Drawing upon concepts from quantum information sciences, including quantum control and information theory, we non-invasively quantify deep tissue microstructure parameters, such as cell sizes or axon diameters, which are approximately 100 times smaller than the imaging resolution [5,6]. Here I present first-principles experiments in preclinical and clinical scanners implemented in phantoms, mouse and human brains [6-9]. These results open up a new avenue for MRI to advance in extracting quantitative, and fast microstructural information from images.

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[9] ESaidman, AZwick, STambalo, TFeiweire, JJovicich, GAÁlvarez, Proc. Intl. Soc. Mag. Reson. Med. 31, 3157 (2023).