Fetoplacental Molecular and Metabolic Magnetic Resonance Imaging

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Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) during pregnancy offers tremendous opportunities for advancing our understanding of the normal and abnormal development of the fetus (unborn baby) and the placenta (the organ responsible for transferring oxygen and nutrients from mother to fetus). MRI is safe to use in pregnancy and, unlike ultrasound, it can create images not only of anatomical structures, but also of tissue function and chemical content. The opportunities for using MRI techniques for functional imaging in pregnancy have dramatically expanded with recent demonstrations by my lab of MRI of fetal fat content and of nutrient and energy use in the placenta and fetus. These new MRI methods show extraordinary promise for improving the information available to doctors about critically important diseases pregnancy like preeclampsia and intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR). Numerous technical obstacles must be overcome before these methods can be routinely used pregnant women. These obstacles range from the need to correct the effects of fetal movement during MRI, to the lack of MRI methods suitable for investigating fetal fat development, through the need to improve our ability to take images of tissue function in the fetus and placenta. This research will solve these problems by: 1. Creating motion compensation methods for MRI during pregnancy: Motion during MRI is the most common cause of poor images and is a particularly big problem for imaging the pregnant woman and her fetus. Fetal motion cannot be avoided: the fetus can't be asked to stop moving, and anesthesia cannot be used as it is too risky for the fetus. Fetal motion is challenging to correct with existing methods: it is random, fast and can be very large so existing motion correction methods that work for adults fail. We will create new motion correction methods that are designed to work in the unique situation of MRI during pregnancy. 2. Developing improved MRI techniques to image nutrient and energy use in the fetus and placenta: My laboratory has pioneered research into MRI investigation of fetal and placental nutrient and energy use. We will continue to refine this work to create methods that are even more sensitive so that even more subtle problems in energy use by the unborn baby and placenta can be detected. 3. Developing new methods for monitoring fetal and placental health: Energy and nutrient use is only one aspect of fetal and placental health. The level of acidity of the placenta is a key indicator of the health of the unborn baby so we will develop new methods for measuring the production of acids in the placenta with the eventual goal of providing additional methods of detecting abnormal pregnancies as early as possible.