Institute pioneers new MRI technology

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The Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute has recruited a star clinician-scientist to lead a research team tasked with adapting magnetic resonance imaging technology for early detection of cancer.

Dr. Jae Kim, a graduate of the University of Toronto's combined MD-PhD program, is a radiologist with a doctorate in MRI Physics. He subsequently completed a fellowship in cardiac MRI at the Cleveland Clinic and, prior to entering medical school, earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kim holds two U.S. patents in MRI physics, has four more U.S. patents pending and has authored numerous publications on the subject of magnetic resonance imaging. His former professor, Dr. John Rowlands, the founding scientific director of the Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute, recruited him from private practice in Arizona.

Research being conducted by Kim in Thunder Bay will focus on using diffusion weighted imaging to detect cancer cells.

"If you put droplets of ink into a bucket of water, after a certain period of time, the ink will diffuse away," he explained. "Of course, in a cancer cell, it's constrained. It doesn't diffuse. In a regular cell, it's also constrained, but they have different characteristics that you can pick up using an MRI. So, you can more or less tag water molecules and then watch over time as they move around. That's basically the idea.

"The technology is already in use and is being used more all the time, but it hasn't been explored much," said Kim. "People are using it and not really understanding it and not pushing the envelope with regard to different manifestations of it. It has been used for stroke, and is only now being used routinely in the clinic for cancer detection, but they're using the same technique that hasn't changed in years. I'm going to see what I can do to make it better."

Kim will be working with a team of five to 10 people, mostly mathematical physicists, several of whom have already been recruited to Thunder Bay.

The research being conducted in Thunder Bay is in synch with the One Millimetre Challenge championed by the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, said Michael Power, CEO of the Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute. Today, tumours are usually detected when they are larger than one centimetre in size. The goal of detecting them when they are only one millimetre in size is largely dependent on the development of advanced imaging techniques.

"Computed tomography (CT) is by and large the number one tool used in the diagnostic realm for cancer care, but the challenge with CT, X-rays and mammography is that they all emit radiation," said Power.
"Using CT is fine if you're in an acute care setting where you're treating metastatic disease, but it's different if you're following up a patient over five, 10 or 15 years or if you're trying to screen for the disease in an asymptomatic individual. Before you expose the patient to radiation, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis and the evidence suggests it does more harm than good."

Colon cancer

Kim will also be working on a project that will use MRI technology to transform the way colon cancer is diagnosed. By reducing the signal to noise ratio, he has improved the MRI picture quality and reduced the time required to take the picture, said Power.

"One of the reasons MRI technology isn't being used more is because it's very expensive. The pictures take 20 minutes to an hour to engineer, so the throughput is weak, driving up the cost of an MRI to as much as $1,000. Kim has been able to develop technology that reduces the picture time from 20 minutes to one minute."

With this improvement, "MRI will become the technology of choice for colon cancer detection," predicted Power.

One of the underlying enablers for improved MRI performance is MRI coil design, a specialty of Sentinelle Medical, a Toronto-based company that Kim worked for while pursuing his MD-PhD and which recently committed to launching a spinoff company in Thunder Bay.

The new company, Tornado Medical Systems, is expected to employ 50 people within the first 18 months of operation and more than 200 by the end of 2013.

The Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute has a staff of 50 working on advanced detection devices, imaging guided interventions and biomarker exploration.


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