Special issue on fluorine-19 magnetic resonance: technical solutions, research promises and frontier applications

Excerpt

Research on fluorine MR has been progressing at an impressive pace and yielding tangible results at the forefront of biomedical research. Several decades after its first documented application [1], the unprecedented opportunities of fluorine MRI in medical research remain intense and represent an area of increasing clinical interest. The challenges associated with fluorine MRI are also equally recognized, most notably the restrictively low detection limits and sensitivity boundaries. Nevertheless, fluorine MRI remains an extremely attractive method for following fluorinated labels that avoids the use of radioactive tracers. New developments from various research domains such as chemistry, physics, engineering and material sciences have joined forces to overcome these challenges and technical barriers. In fact, progress in fluorine MRI spans a very broad range of fields, from the chemistry of label and probe synthesis and production, through to biological and clinical applications, as well as physics, information technology and data science for image acquisition and processing [2]. …