Blood Contrast Enhancement with a Novel, Non-Gaseous Nanoparticle Contrast Agent

Modern ultrasound contrast agents primarily comprise microbubble formulations that circulate in the intravascular compartment and are designed to enhance acoustic signals reflected from the blood pool. A variety of shell materials have been utilized to stabilize gas bubbles of the order of 1–10 microns in diameter. Reflectivity from microbubbles is enhanced by resonance and non-linear physical effects. However, the overall efficacy of bubbles as contrast agents must be considered in light of their marked instability to insonification pressures, marked attenuation artifacts, “blooming” effects, and their short circulatory half-life. Low molecular weight gaseous perfluorocarbon formulations have been utilized in vivo because they may offer advantages in formulation and reflectivity. In contrast, higher molecular weight perfluorocarbon emulsions that are liquid at body temperature have been formulated as nongaseous nanoparticle preparations (diameters 100– 300 nanometers), originally for use as blood substitutes. Unfortunately they exhibit low inherent echogenicity and are poor blood pool contrast agents under conditions of conventional 2-D echocardiography or harmonic imaging, or when imaged with color flow or spectral Doppler. Nevertheless, these nanoparticle formulations are chemically inert, manifest long circulatory half-lives, are not destroyed by ultrasonic imaging, and they possess low acoustic attenuation. Such features might still render them of interest as blood pool contrast agents if properly formulated and imaged. Recently, a new ultrasonic imaging modality, Power Doppler Harmonic Imaging (PDHI), has been introduced (4). This technique color-encodes changes in acoustic signal amplitude and motion of ultrasonic scatterers between insonifying pulses. PDHI has been used in a number of clinical studies to assess coronary artery bypass graft patency, tumor blood flow, and myocardial perfusion. In view of the exquisite sensitivity of Doppler for detecting the presence of small scatterers with limited scattering cross-sections as compared to microbubbles (e.g., red blood cells), and the enhanced ability of PDHI to register backscatter power, we hypothesized that certain liquid perfluorocarbon nanoparticle emulsions (5) might be more efficiently detected with this new imaging modality. Furthermore, although we have demonstrated previously that the liquid nanoparticle emulsions do not manifest any appreciable resonance behavior at clinically relevant imaging frequencies, they have performed well as targeted imaging agents in vitro and in vivo over a very broad range of frequencies (5–50 MHz)(6–8). Thus we anticipated that the PDHI method might permit imaging of these nanoparticles in the blood pool without reliance on any intrinsic resonance behavior.