Preliminary study of copper oxide nanoparticles acoustic and magnetic properties for medical imaging

The implementation of multimodal imaging in medicine is highly beneficial as different physical properties may provide complementary information, augmented detection ability, and diagnosis verification. Nanoparticles have been recently used as contrast agents for various imaging modalities. Their significant advantage over conventional large-scale contrast agents is the ability of detection at early stages of the disease, being less prone to obstacles on their path to the target region, and possible conjunction to therapeutics. Copper ions play essential role in human health. They are used as a cofactor for multiple key enzymes involved in various fundamental biochemistry processes. Extremely small size copper oxide nanoparticles (CuO-NPs) are readily soluble in water with high colloidal stability yielding high bioavailability. The goal of this study was to examine the magnetic and acoustic characteristics of CuO-NPs in order to evaluate their potential to serve as contrast imaging agent for both MRI and ultrasound. CuO-NPs 7nm in diameter were synthesized by hot solution method. The particles were scanned using a 9.4T MRI and demonstrated a concentration dependent T1 relaxation time shortening phenomenon. In addition, it was revealed that CuO-NPs can be detected using the ultrasonic B-scan imaging. Finally, speed of sound based ultrasonic computed tomography was applied and showed that CuO-NPs can be clearly imaged. In conclusion, the preliminary results obtained, positively indicate that CuO-NPs may be imaged by both MRI and ultrasound. The results motivate additional in-vivo studies, in which the clinical utility of fused images derived from both modalities for diagnosis improvement will be studied.