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Home → Application → Magnetic particles for magnetic resonance diagnostics
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Magnetic particles help to detect a tumor.
A new method of cancer diagnostics uses magnetic particles for detecting metastases in lymph nodes even when they can’t be detected by other means traditionally used for that purpose. One of the advantages of this process is that it doesn’t require surgery.
Magnetoresonant image of magnetic nanoparticles can help tell the healthy lymph nodes (green) from the metastatic (red).
For medical care professionals as well as for their patients, detecting metastases is quite distressing. Very often the only way to find which lymph nodes are affected by cancer cells is surgery. Additional disturbance of healthy tissue durig surgerical diagnostics of metastatic damage is caused because some nodes that appear clear can in fact be affected by metastatic cells, so visual detection of tumor is not quite accurate.
The magnetic particles are aimed not at tumor cells, but at healthy tissue cells, for example, microphages — a class of immune cells that pass through health lymph nodes. Uptaken by the microphages, the magnetic particles change magnetic properties of a cell, causing, among other things, signal attenuation and „sheathing“ the lymph node when it’s viewed with magnetoresonant tomography. Tumor cells fill the lymph tracts where metostases are, and by doing so they significantly reduce the micophages flow and a number of particels that blur the image.
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