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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, is a widely used medical tool for taking pictures of the insides of our body. One way to make MRI scans easier to read is through the use of contrast agents -- magnetic dyes injected into the blood or given orally to patients that then travel to organs and tissues, making them easier to see. Recently, researchers have begun to develop next-generation contrast agents, such as magnetic nanoparticles, that can be directed specifically to sites of interest, such as tumors.

But there remains a problem with many of these agents: they are sometimes difficult to distinguish from our bodies' tissues, which give off their own MRI signals. For example, a researcher reading an MRI scan may not know with certainty if a dark patch near a tumor represents a contrast agent bound to the tumor, or is an unrelated signal from surrounding tissue.

Caltech's Mikhail Shapiro, assistant professor of chemical engineering, thinks he has a solution. He and his team are working on "erasable" contrast agents that would have the ability to blink off, on command, thereby revealing their location in the body.

"We're developing MRI contrast agents that can be erased with ultrasound, allowing you to turn them off," says Shapiro, who is also a Schlinger Scholar and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator. "It's the same principle behind blinking bicycle lights. Having the lights turn on and off makes them easier to see, only in our case we just blink off the contrast agent once."

The new research was published in the February 26 advanced issue of Nature Materials, and is on the cover of the May print edition out this month. The lead author is George Lu, a postdoctoral scholar in Shapiro's lab.

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