Case Western, Siemens Brainchild MR Fingerprinting Quantifies Imaging

25266024262_e7c57da1f4_zImaging company Siemens and Case Western Reserve University professors have teamed up to develop MRI technology that will produce images as distinguishable to a physician as a fingerprint is to a forensic scientist. This new software, known as magnetic resonance fingerprinting or MRF, is designed to measure the quantitative characteristics of tissues, compared to the current MR images that display namely qualitative analyses. There are current quantitative measurements done by MR images, but these are lengthy and highly variable, prompting Siemens to search for a more efficacious and accurate solution: MR fingerprinting. The partnership of these two medical powerhouses aims to evaluate patients better by using MR fingerprints to categorize tissues and disease across the scanner infrastructure. Differing from traditional MR images, MR fingerprinting will collect information from evolving signals of voxel coordinates and crosscheck them with a database of signals that translates it into quantitative parameters. MR fingerprints provide more detailed, more defined images that just might turn the MR world on its head; this would revolutionize the procedure of radiologists to include numeric data along with pre-existing qualitative observations.