Imaging of Thromboinflammation by Multispectral ¹⁹F MRI

The close interplay between thrombotic and immunologic processes plays an important physiological role in the immune defence after tissue injury and has the aim to reduce damage and to prevent the spread of invading pathogens. However, the uncontrolled or exaggerated activation of these processes can lead to pathological thromboinflammation. Thromboinflammation has been shown to worsen the outcome of cardiovascular, autoinflammatory, or even infectious diseases. Imaging of thromboinflammation is difficult because many clinically relevant imaging techniques can only visualize either inflammatory or thrombotic processes. One interesting option for the noninvasive imaging of thromboinflammation is multispectral ¹⁹F magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Due to the large chemical shift range of the ¹⁹F atoms, it is possible to simultaneously visualize immune cells as well as thrombus components with specific ¹⁹F tracer that have individual spectral ¹⁹F signatures. Of note, the ¹⁹F signal can be easily quantified and a merging of the ¹⁹F datasets with the anatomical ¹H MRI images enables precise anatomical localization. In this review, we briefly summarize the background of ¹⁹F MRI for inflammation imaging, active targeting approaches to visualize thrombi and specific immune cells, introduce studies about multispectral ¹⁹F MRI, and summarize one study that imaged thromboinflammation by multispectral ¹⁹F MRI.